Hello everyone:

I’ve been stretched a bit thin recently, and forgot to offer solstice greetings last week. I hope that for all of you, in both the northern and southern hemispheres, the solstice offered a moment of reflection on the movement of the spheres, and on our good fortune to be here for a little while within the wonder.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

Dead-end Thinking

One of the worst, and luckiest, moments in my life was when I was lost in the woods for a couple hours as an adolescent. I was fifteen. My father and I were way up north here in Maine, at the dead end of one of innumerable logging roads cut randomly amid what felt to me then to be the endless and shapeless green mass of forest. That forest, cut and regrown in patchwork fashion every generation or so, and riddled with dead-end gravel roads whose logic is extractive rather than navigational, extends hundreds of miles to the Canadian border and beyond.

My father and I went off in different directions and were meant to meet back up at the car. But I missed the road on my return and kept going, sure it was just up ahead, and then increasingly worried that I was way off track and late and so should move faster and faster, crossing streams I had not crossed before, and making increasingly senseless decisions amid the loneliness of my panic.

It’s hard to quantify just how lucky I was, as I headed farther and farther away from the car and my father waiting beside it under the late afternoon sun, when some miles away I came across another lonely logging road, and how lucky I was that a car happened along a few minutes later, driven by a man with a map and the kindness to take me back to my father.

There’s more to that story - what it meant to me then and what it means now - but it came to mind recently when thinking about the dangerous absurdity of the idea that we’re on our way to “terraforming” Mars. The northern forest of Maine, like much of the Earth, is a deeply disrupted place. Managed like grass - a simplified and dismembered ecology cut down repeatedly for purely human benefit - these “working” forests are, like so many of the places we love, an example of how we’ve reshaped and diminished life on this planet.

A Half-Witted Bond Villain

Terraforming, defined as making another planet Earth-like for human purposes, is a grotesque and ironic fantasy. Men of a certain cold imagination seek to green Mars while the civilization they’ve siphoned far too much wealth and power from siphons far too much green life out of Earth. In any rational and empathetic analysis, the promise of Mars is as empty as the future they would create here, if we let them.

There’s a whole industry being built toward this, but the fantasy’s primary spokesman is Elon Musk, an inarticulate man-child who has always struck me as an adolescent acting out of the loneliness of his panic. (That panic wobbles between the usual white male anxieties behind racism, transphobia, and delusions of grandeur.) In his public persona, he is a half-witted Bond villain responsible for 780,000 deaths (most of them children) and a would-be trillionaire whose current business plan is to surround the Earth with a million AI-enabled satellites so he can control and weaponize the flow of information across civilization. (In most business uses AI will only slightly increase efficiency while drastically increasing corporate power.) If that makes him seem smart, remember that his stated justification for moving some of humanity to Mars is because in a billion years or so the Sun may make life on Earth impossible.

Meanwhile, due to previous human behavior (led by men like Musk), the conditions for life on Earth are rapidly changing. The atmosphere and oceans are heating faster than species can adapt, terrestrial forests and grasslands need to be restored rather than further degraded, the worlds of Arctic and Antarctic ice are changing by the day, and 8.3 billion people are increasingly suffering from a cascade of effects on every aspect of our lives. In the face of this threat to life that’s occurring now - and will intensify over the next few decades - many of the wealthiest and most powerful men on the planet are making things worse, not better, all while imagining that someday they’ll play Monopoly with the solar system.

The Uselessness of the Trajectory

No one articulates it this way, but as it’s formulated now the idea of terraforming Mars feels like a zero-sum game in which our focus on moving to an uninhabitable planet requires the disruption of this one. This is despite the fact that, as far as we know, Earth is the only place that supports complex life. Advertised as the genius of human thinking moving outward to the stars, terraforming fantasies seem to me instead to be the usual ugly tangle of colonial and parasitic impulses that have characterized the Anthropocene.

I should be clear: I think efficient space exploration with probes and rovers is great, and probably worth the price. More to the point here, I love sci-fi stories, and have cheerfully watched a lot of the genre on TV and in movies, but I try not to forget that what I’m watching is not a path to our future but a map of our moment. From Star Trek to Star Wars and all the more subtle storytelling that surrounds them in the sci-fi universe, these stories are what I think of as “stellarnovelas”: political fictions, cultural experiments, and soap operas meant to help us examine our 20th and 21st century social and civilizational behaviors. They are often meant to move us forward, but not outward; to encourage empathy over apathy; to make us better Earthlings, not half-witted Martians.

Part of what is so infuriating about lifeless men with wealth and power redirecting far too much of society’s resources toward the fantasy of colonizing a lifeless planet is the uselessness of the trajectory. It isn’t the most infuriating aspect - which is their disregard for both human suffering and the fate of life on Earth - but it matters that most of us are sure we’re being led down the garden path by violent fools.

The fantasy of that path would turn the Moon into a mining colony, testing ground, and eventual scorched launch pad for the journey to Mars. As I’ve written, that plan is almost certainly a delusion to be betrayed by harsh lunar realities. And if the Moon plan fails, then so does our trip to Mars. But that failure won’t negate the harm of the pursuit. Because while our would-be tech overlords inflict the emptiness of their Mars-seeking souls upon our daily lives, what they’re ignoring (or abetting) is the Venusiforming of Earth.

More Xenoformers than Terraformers

Venus, named for the Roman goddess of love and beauty, orbits the Sun between Mercury and Earth, and is a frequent bright companion in our night skies. If you were to attempt a visit, however, you’d find a hellscape. The atmospheric pressure on the surface is the equivalent of being a kilometer underwater, the pounds per square inch “like having a small car sitting on your thumbnail,” according to the Planetary Society. Temperatures can reach 870°F (460°C). The atmosphere is nearly all carbon dioxide and the persistent cloud layer that covers the planet is mostly sulfuric acid. Venus may have had liquid water and suitable conditions for life early in its history, but that dense CO2 atmosphere long ago led to a “runaway greenhouse effect,” a heating feedback loop that has boiled off all water and made the planet intensely inhospitable.

I’m not suggesting that we’re turning Earth into Venus. In fact, what research has been done on this question suggests that the physics of our emissions and deforestation simply couldn’t accomplish it even if that was our goal. What I am saying is that the way in which we currently imagine ourselves as a multi-planet species suggests we’re failing the test of being even a one-planet species.

Put another way, we’re acting like aliens from Venus who are Venusiforming, or “xenoforming,” Earth instead. Xenoforming is a sci-fi term for aliens changing the Earth to suit their own needs. Except, of course, that the warming and diminished Earth is proving to be as dangerous for us as it is for corals and penguins and grasslands.

From the point of view of most of life on Earth, we act more like aliens than community members, aliens who seem determined to fragment and diminish the planet’s ecosystems while pumping out a massive amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Even if we limit the warming to a few degrees - which is not at all certain - the transformation of this planet’s living conditions, from ocean acidification and deoxygenation to the loss of polar ice and agricultural productivity, will be extraordinary.

It already is extraordinary. Just ask the Pakistani farmers who have been showing up at their dentist’s office with rapidly rotting teeth. In a must-read article from the Earth Island Journal, “When the Heat Steals Your Smile,” that dentist writes that these farmers, who regularly work in temperatures exceeding 113°F (45°C), are victims of “environmental collapse writing itself directly into human biological systems.” Despite drinking 15-20 liters of water per day in the heat, their mouths remain dry, and without saliva teeth can decay in a matter of weeks:

Before he left my clinic that day, I asked him what he’d want people to know about what’s happening to him and others like him… “Tell them that climate change isn’t abstract,” he said. “It’s here, right now, in my mouth, in my family’s survival, in my ability to work and eat and live with dignity… It’s not just teeth; it’s my entire future. And I’m not alone. Every farmer I know is experiencing this. We’re all getting older before our time. We’re all becoming invisible.”

It is, after all, very difficult to see a Pakistani farmer from a billion-dollar rocket headed to Mars.

Neither Venus Nor Mars

It was my friend, the writer and photographer Jim Mastro, who wrote to me to suggest I write about the irony of our imagined terraforming of Mars while actually doing some Venusiforming of Earth. He noted that Elon Musk’s “knowledge of ecology and planetary geology is as void as his moral compass,” and worried, quite knowledgeably, that we may not limit warming to a few degrees. I should say also that I had the great luck of meeting Jim in grad school, where he told me about his work in Antarctica and then kindly helped me become an Antarctican too. Like the stranger in the car on the logging road, he redirected my life in ways I’m still immensely grateful for.

Between us, Jim and I have more than a couple decades of Antarctic experience, and we can say with certainty that despite being several orders of magnitude easier to occupy than Mars, Antarctica is still not a human home. We visit, work, even play on the vast sheet of ice, but no one truly inhabits it.

I don’t know how all this Martian dreaming will play out, but feel sure that if we don’t launch from a planet that we love and care for as deeply as we dream of a multi-planetary human future, then we will not have that future. Mars is impossible, Venus is unthinkable. Earth is perfect, and we are imperfect, but we’re home. For all the libraries and websites filled with information and stories about the biodiversity and climate crises, it all comes down to the question of whether we understand that we are already home, and whether we will begin to act on that understanding.

The nexus of physics and psychology is this: Who we are is what we do. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, whether each in our own little gray matter fable factories or across the entire human population, are only true if their narratives are borne out by the actions we take in the real world. If I’m a tough rocket-building hero in the stories I tell myself but a psychopath to the people around me, then I’m a psychopath. If we imagine that our species gives the Earth its meaning but are busy cutting off large branches on the tree of life, then we’re little better than a chainsaw amid the light-eating miracle of leaves.

Among the 8.3 billion of us are nearly 8.3 billion who know, one way or another, what I’m saying here. So many of us are doing good work to care for life on Earth, or supporting those who who do. Still somehow, though, like my teenage self we feel lost and a bit panicked amid the disrupted green world. We’ll need some luck, a tendency toward kindness, and a map to help us retreat from our dead-end exploitation of life and take us home. Which, to be clear, is neither Venus nor Mars.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

For my Maine readers who care about the fate of birds, please check out the Avian Haven Blog. The bird-rescue facility Avian Haven, in Freedom, has for the last few months been publishing some well-written, thoughtful posts on what’s happening behind the scenes at their vital facility, like “Over 100 Baby Birds — And Not One of Them Can Know We’re Here,” about ensuring chicks don’t imprint on their caregivers; “She’s Spent 20 Summers Rehabbing Baby Birds,” about one of those dedicated caregivers; and “Our 1000th Patient This Year,” about the incredible amount of work they’ve already done halfway through the year. The blog also offers suggestions for favorite bird documentaries and books.

From the Times, “The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.Vs,” an excellent visual explainer of how the U.S. car industry has been building vehicles for a couple decades despite the serious increase in pedestrian deaths caused by high hoods and poor visibility from the driver’s seat in these oversized, overpriced trucks and SUVs. The motive is money, of course, because these larger vehicles don’t cost much more to build but earn far more in profits than the ordinary cars and trucks that we should be driving. One of the most effective segments of the article is a graphic/video showing what happens to a pedestrian when struck by a small car vs. a large pick-up.

From and Predirections, “Is Restoration Chasing Ghosts?”, a thoughtful exploration of what ecological restoration should be in a rapidly changing world. For all of our desire to bring back close replicas of the ecosystems and landscapes that existed before Anthropocene disruptions, that’s a) largely impossible, because of the depth and extent of change that’s occurred already, and b) probably unwise, given the resilience these natural systems will require to survive the changes that are coming. But this isn’t about giving up; it’s about restoring as much as possible, as fully and accurately and wisely as possible, all while acknowledging that what we’re restoring must fit the world we have rather than the world we lost.

From MIT Technology Review, “Hacking the Atmosphere: Geoengineering Gets a Reality Check,” an overview of current efforts - and the current debate - regarding stratospheric geoengineering, in which tons of sulfur dioxide and other particles would be spread by plane several miles above the Earth to partially shield it from the Sun’s rays, in order to slightly reduce planetary warming. The idea is still as logistically challenged as it is ethically nightmarish. The planes for this don’t exist, and we don’t know how to engineer the particles, while at the same time we have no clear idea on how the work would impact global weather or which poor nations would suffer the most (again) at the hands of rich nations’ wayward technology.

From and The Weekly Anthropocene, “Atrocity,” a deep, difficult, and necessary take-down of Elon Musk based on his DOGE team’s destruction of USAID and the hundreds of thousands of deaths it has caused around the world. Those 780,000 estimated deaths I noted in the essay above are comparable to many of the 20th century’s genocides. To his credit, Sam (who produces the most optimistic forward-looking newsletter I know) does not hold back:

In my personal opinion, Elon Musk has become far, far, far worse than Osama bin Laden. He has killed orders of magnitude more innocent children.

I don’t support the death penalty, though this case has tested that principle more than any other. I would prefer that everyone involved in this atrocity be charged for their crimes against humanity in a modern vision of the Nuremberg trials, and ideally jailed for multiple life sentences.

Musk is not quite history’s greatest monster. But he’s pretty high on the list, definitely in the top 100. It is obscene beyond words that he is also the world’s first trillionaire.

That’s my comment on the SpaceX IPO.

Vote blue in November.

From the Atlantic, “ICE Might be Violating America’s Other Bill of Rights,” an insightful and useful reminder that the ICE and CPB officers using excessive force “like an out-of-control police force” are not actually law enforcement. They are, under the law, administrative officials. This makes them more subject to the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act than to the Fourth Amendment, especially since the Supreme Court keeps siding with the Trump administration and limiting how the amendment applies to ICE and CPB. The APA, however, resonates with several Supreme Court decisions limiting the agents of federal agencies to activities explicitly defined by those agencies:

The statute also allows courts to review potentially unlawful action, thereby ensuring agencies follow the Constitution, other federal laws, and their own rules and procedures.

From and Experimental History, a note in his quarterly round-up of fascinating stories about how AI might actually be a useful tool in convincing conspiracy theorists that they have been wrong about, say, 9/11 or the Covid-19 vaccine. Mastroianni cites a new study in Science which reports that “The AI chatbot’s ability to sustain tailored counterarguments and personalized in-depth conversations reduced their beliefs in conspiracies for months.” Mastroianni lays out a really interesting reality check in response:

This is, I think, an underrated and positive aspect of AI. People are worried about [AI] hallucinations and AI psychosis, and rightfully so. But keep in mind that many people do not know basic, uncontroversial truths about their world. 37% of Americans—a plurality—believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. 40% don’t understand how a control group works. 26% think that the sun goes around the Earth. For these people, talking to a chatbot is likely to leave them with a more accurate view of reality.

From Aeon, “What is this rock?”, a fascinating description of a too-fast geologic process occurring on a part of the English coast, in which conglomerates (sedimentary rock composed of pebbles and cobbles of other stones on the Earth’s surface) with human-made debris are being rapidly melded into a new kind of stone. The author and his colleagues “believe that this little-known section of the English coastline represents a tangible and potentially long-lasting signature of the impact humans are having on the planet.” Here’s his lead photo from the article:

Share

Hello everyone:

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

One of my favorite uses of a verb in a poem is by the great Mary Oliver in her Pulitzer-winning book American Primitive. In “Mushrooms,” she describes the fungal fruiting bodies “pummeling upward” through the soil, quiet fists breaking out of their shadow realm into ours. For me, the “mm” sound of “pummel” always evokes the emergence of a smooth, round mushroom cap. Here are the opening lines:

Rain, and then
the cool pursed
lips of the wind
draw them
out of the ground—
red and yellow skulls
pummelling upward
through leaves,
through grasses,
through sand; astonishing...

As with so much of Oliver’s writing, the poem finds awe and wonder while exploring the darkness and depth of the natural world. Here, in a continuation of the lines above, she finds their arrival “astonishing / in their suddenness, / their quietude, their wetness…”

“Mushrooms” is an autumn poem, but I’ve been thinking this spring of that lovely tension between life’s irrepressible energy – its suddenness – and its quietude. Life has burst forth all around us, and spring has somehow already surged into summer at what seems a dizzying speed.

Walking from winter into spring on the trails and back roads here in midcoast Maine, Heather and I eagerly awaited the first signs of skunk cabbage and wood frog but – just days later, it seems – we find ourselves with lilac blooms on the dining table and cucumber seedlings blinking awake in the garden.

Spring ephemerals, like the trailing arbutus you see above, had their moment before trees performed their magic of converting small woody buds into broad green leaves. Wood frogs croaked gently and briefly before giving way to the crescendo of spring peepers and the dissonant trilled harmonies of American toads. Everyone is on a quest: frogs, turtles, and salamanders for water and sex, porcupines for dandelion greens or willow twigs (everything is delicious after a winter of eating spruce bark), and hermit thrushes for territory to claim.

Here are two male toads singing together in my mother’s little garden pond:

And here is the fruit of their labor, one month later, with hundreds of toad tadpoles (toadpoles?) announcing that spring has turned to summer:

As always, spring feels like a wild ruckus celebrating the explosion of life. It’s a crazy party. Everybody is advertising for sex. That’s the suddenness that Mary Oliver reminds us of. But there’s also the quietness, and that’s the lesson I have on my mind.

I don’t mean quietness as a function of sound, really, but as a modesty of presence. No one is trying to take over.

Pick any example I mention here – fern or thrush or lilac or frog – or one of ten thousand others in your neck of the woods, and consider its modesty of place and size of claim. Sure, the peepers are deafening up close, but each one is the size of a quarter and the species fades back into the foliage after mating season. Likewise, a spring ephemeral blossoms briefly into Hello and then disappears, the earliest wallflowers to leave the party. Many ferns (interrupted, cinnamon, sensitive, bracken, etc.) stick around all summer, but in modest numbers and quiet places.

Some species are busier, certainly. Hemlocks or oaks may dominate a forest canopy, but they’re more shepherds than autocrats, hosting complexity in their branches, on the ground, and among their roots. On the islands of coastal Maine, hay-scented ferns can form dense colonies that block other plants from growing, but this is a phase in forest succession rather than a permanent state. An abundance of wolves or deer will alter their community, but in a truly natural landscape that predator/prey abundance phases in and out according to the tides of energy in the system.

There is something built into the fabric of life which places the highest value on modesty. I don’t mean sexual modesty - witness the bright colors of baboon butts, peacock tails, and lilac blossoms, and the complex songs of hermit thrush, bellbird/korimako and lyre bird. I mean instead how the push-and-pull of a living community requires that everyone live within limits. Those limits on growth are the genius behind biodiversity, which is the genius of life.

Even the amazing fecundity of a female oyster, for example, birthing perhaps 100 million eggs in a year, is a function of a system built for limits, in which nearly all those eggs end up as food for the oyster’s neighbors. Likewise, despite suburban protests, the billion dandelion seeds floating through the neighborhood are also modest, doomed to be mere stars amid the grassy universe.

Species grow, reproduce, and die amid a dense thicket of relationships that shape and constrain their capacity to crowd each other out. Call it competition (if you still think there’s such a thing as an individual) or call it cooperation (if you’re a relentless optimist), but either way it’s a community living by rules so ancient and authoritative they might as well have been written by the Sun.

My thoughts on these matters, as you probably expect, often turn to this: Where are we in relation to this truth about the living world, and where are we going next? Or rather, what do we need to learn in order to make a viable future for us and our living community?

The word I have in mind is restraint.

In fact, I’ve had the word in mind since my first Field Guide post (five years ago, but updated here), in which I honored my father and the great writer Barry Lopez, both of whom had recently died, as I introduced the concept of the Anthropocene. I quoted Lopez (from Arctic Dreams), offering one of his gentle, elegant, and deeply sophisticated nuggets of wisdom on the conundrum of human choice amid our species’ catastrophic actions:

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent… Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about where to defer.

I recommend you read that paragraph again, because you’re unlikely to read anything as essential and articulate for a while. In the heart of it is a short sentence that exemplifies the entire point: He must learn restraint.

As happens so often while reading Lopez, I’m inspired by the beautiful clarity of his writing and heartsick at the faint likelihood of civilization attaining that clarity. But that’s the task before us. We have to acknowledge that nurturing empathy and community are existential skills, that society must have physical limits, and that culture must devise metaphysical laws to set those limits, to instruct us in the kind of modesty that exists inherently everywhere on Earth.

Put another way, we somehow have to shoehorn the industrialized globe back toward the spirit of small-impact societies that characterized human life for millennia. Indigenous peoples still live that life, more or less, quietly working with too few resources to protect much of the land the rest of us have not yet damaged. They’ve done so even as, in mere decades, our dominant society has burned millions of years of stored fossil fuels to power today’s delusion that, despite the evidence all around us, we somehow deserve another planet.

This question of energy is at the core of the restraint problem. For more than a century, we've been pretending that we had unlimited energy with no meaningful consequences. The good news is that there’s a successful effort underway to replace fossil fuel energy sources with renewables. The bad news is that a) it’s too late to avoid a terrible proportion of those existential consequences, b) clean energy is not yet clean enough, and c) we seem intent on using these new energy sources to power a civilization that still devours and contaminates life on Earth.

Any discussion of restraint – in energy, consumption, or population – is still hard to find amid the glossy advertisements promising we can live exactly as we do now (or better!) if only we replace our fossil fires with quiet energy from solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and grid-scale electric batteries.

There’s plenty of truth in that promise, not least because fossil fuels are largely responsible for our transgressions of planetary boundaries. Conditions for all life on Earth improve with every bit of oil, gas, and coal left in the ground. And I find plenty of joy in watching the rapid replacement of fossil fuel sources with these cleaner technologies. We’re already at the point where someone with moderate wealth and access can easily electrify their home and transport. (Oil-based plastics, and the fertilizer that grows our industrial food, are another matter.) The entire notion of “renewables”, in fact, is a symbol of restraint, in that we’re choosing not to endlessly extract energy resources for one-time usage.

But even as solar panels and batteries spread like beneficial wildfire across the globe, human consumption of everything keeps increasing.

And it will for decades, by all accounts. We still live with the fatal fantasy of constant growth, the logic of a cancer cell applied to economics. All of life has suffered from this dangerous notion that only by constantly growing can human society thrive. That’s how civilization became a hyperobject defined more by its machines than by its people. Every time I hear reports on economic growth – particularly concerns about a slow-down – I remember that I’m listening to the theme song of a culture that mows down the natural world with the sophistication of a bulldozer and the motivation of a junkie.

Meanwhile, human numbers are still increasing at the rate of the population of Germany each year. The developed world is increasingly being built around new information technologies that maximize consumption for us and profits for the most wealthy, who are responsible for far too much of our damage to the Earth. And as the developing world skips the fossil-fuel development phase by installing vast quantities of cheap renewables, a few billion people’s access to goods and overall quality of life will improve. That’s a necessary and beautiful thing, but in a culture that doesn’t measure the environment in the cost of doing business, it comes at a planetary cost. The scale of the cost will be determined by how much we understand the importance of restraint.

As a 2023 study found, for example, we could radically reduce (92% by 2050) mining for minerals necessary to electrified transportation by making EVs and their batteries smaller, by reducing our dependency on cars, and by building a robust battery-recycling system. Looking around now, we see that while too many EV models are still oversized and overpriced, battery recycling technologies are building up in efficiency and scale, and there are good prospects for (among others) sodium-ion and solid-state battery technologies, both of which would have far fewer environmental impacts than lithium-ion batteries.

The tension here lies largely in the myth that working full-tilt on “fixing” climate change will also resolve the biodiversity crisis. In reality, there is only the biodiversity crisis - a jargon term for the fate of life on Earth - and the heating climate is a major component of it. But if we’re not actively restoring lost habitat, reducing chemical use in agriculture, dreaming up ways to reduce ocean acidification and deoxygenation, and conserving areas of land and sea necessary for large-scale resistance to increased extinctions, then we’re not paying attention. A world full of solar panels won’t be enough.

All of that would, I think, fit under Barry Lopez’s notion of finding a “wiser way of behaving toward the land.”

As the mushrooms, toads, and spring ephemerals teach us, the end of growth is maturity. Societies, like organisms, must grow up and then stabilize.

Life is to be lived with restraint within community, not in an expression of dominance that can only end in catastrophe. Like a trailing arbutus, our time on Earth should look something like this: We pummel our way into existence, we have a modest moment, we have a modest claim to space and resources, we exist briefly as a conscious node in a conscious world, and then we die a modest death without taking the world down with us.

We are, after all, little more than spring ephemerals ourselves, mortal sparks on an ocean planet that will outlive us by billions of years. We call it Earth because we’re biased toward staying above ground as long as we can, at any cost, including apparently the setting of the world on fire.

Yet we must, as Mary Oliver reported faithfully from her beloved forest,

…stagger down
fast as mushrooms themselves
when they are done being perfect
and overnight
slide back under the shining
fields of rain.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

Is there better writing on Substack than what offers at Death & Birds? Not that I know of. Her latest, “Keening,” is another simply extraordinary personal, ecological, philosophical, and lyrical bit of brilliance wrapped up in a brief little essay. Her writing and feeling are as light and as purposeful as feathers, and just as marvelous whether examined up close, sentence by sentence, or viewed from a distance as a beautiful bird-like construction inhabiting a deeply-loved sky. Here are her opening lines:

When I was young, I would sometimes walk to the churchyard and lay on the grass next to my mother’s grave. The boundaries between self, ground, bone, now, and then, all become rather permeable in certain places, and this was one of them. At times I’d have the vague sense of someone watching me from a distance, and I wonder whether perhaps it was me, here, in the future.

To contemplate in the run-up to July 4th, from my wife and A Nest of Songs, “My Country is the Earth,” a song based on words by Thomas Paine - “My country is the world. To do good is my religion” - and a short essay that links Paine and Robin Wall Kimmerer with the notion that all that is glorious is contained in nature.

From and What If We Get It Right?, a fun and insightful conversation with artist, writer, environmentalist Perrin Ireland about her new book, Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn From Animal Sex. Ireland speaks eloquently about living at the nexus of the joy she takes from studying animals and the grief she feels at our disruption of their lives:

It’s pretty hard to be an animal lover during a sixth mass extinction. Part of why I talk a lot about animals to people is to not be alone with that. It’s so excruciating to me every day. And I can’t talk about my joy in finding out how much sex a lioness has when she’s in heat, which is so fun, without talking about habitat loss and climate change… I can’t talk about albatross monogamy without talking about how much plastic they’re living in. I can’t talk about a 50-pound elephant dick without talking about how the savanna’s gone. I can’t talk about seal lesbian relationships without talking about how fur seals got listed as endangered after this book went to the printer.

From Inside Climate News, the Trump administration has finally lost enough battles in court that it seems to be abandoning its efforts to stop wind power projects around the U.S.

From and A World of 8 Billion, a useful explainer article on the recent referendum in Switzerland on whether to legally cap the nation’s population at 10 million people. It’s as much about immigration and conservative nationalism as it is about the numbers.

From Owl in America: Notes from an American Environmentalist, another insightful weekly round-up of stories in the legal and political realm. This is a newsletter I highly recommend, one written in the spirit of Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American.” This week, Owl highlights actions in Congress a) by Democrats to protect public lands from being sold off and b) by Republicans to eliminate the Roadless Rule and allow logging and road-building in protected National Forest lands. She also discusses the logic of forest-thinning for fire prevention, updates previous stories on Marine Protected Areas, and discusses Biden’s former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland winning the Democratic nomination for governor of New Mexico.

From bioGraphic, “No One Knows How to Handle Nurdle Spills,” a report a year after a spill of 3.5 million pounds of plastic nurdles (small beads used in plastics manufacturing) hit India’s Kerala coast. While nations have protocols for oil spills, there are none for coping with waves of pellets washing up on shore and contaminating the marine environment for centuries:

Undisturbed, a plastic nurdle can take thousands of years to fully disintegrate. But when exposed to sunlight and oxygen, the plastic gets brittle, allowing wind and waves to break the nurdles into ever-smaller pieces. More concerning, Vincent says, is how the nurdles may be affecting local wildlife. When nurdles settle into beach sand or seabed sediments, worms, shellfish, crustaceans, and other bottom-dwellers can mistake the toxic pellets for food.

“Nurdles can act like tiny sponges for pollution, attracting toxic chemicals such as heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants onto their surfaces,” Vincent says. “When marine animals ingest them, these pollutants may enter their bodies and cause harm.”

From Yale e360, “Efforts to Save Kelp Forests from Ocean Warming are Ramping Up,” a good-news/hard-news story about efforts, finally, to help restore and make more resilient kelp forests which provide extraordinary benefits to ocean biodiversity and carbon sequestration. Kelp forests have been declining, and we have not been paying enough attention:

Healthy kelp forests need cool, nutrient-rich seawater to survive. As ocean waters warm, kelp can no longer inhabit parts of their former range. The crisis is escalating quickly. Kelp forests are vanishing twice as fast as coral reefs and four times faster than tropical rainforests. An estimated 40 percent to 60 percent of kelp forests worldwide have been lost or significantly degraded in the last 50 years. These precipitous declines typically received far less scientific scrutiny than higher-profile ecological crises. But kelp has gradually been getting more attention as scientists and the environmental community come to recognize the value of the carbon that coastal ecosystems, including kelp forests, can capture.

Share

Hello everyone:

For a one-stop site to listen to samples of our ocean noise pollution sources, check out the “Anthropogenic Sounds” audio gallery at Discovery of Sound in the Sea.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

Great Damage at Great Distances

For those of us living in wealthy, high-consumption cultures, one of the hallmarks of this bizarre and tenuous era in human history is our capacity to do great damage at great distances. Despite the better angels of our nature - our concerns and empathies - what we eat, wear, drive, or buy are often extracted at great cost to seldom-seen human and ecological communities. Irrational but powerful forces wreak havoc for their profit and our consumption, and to the extent that we participate in that culture, we are both complicit in and ensnared by that havoc.

Usually, a discussion about our capacity to do such harm is illustrated by the media, activists, or scientists bringing the story to our attention. The oceans, though, are something of a black box. It’s too dark to see and very few people there to see it. And when the harm is acoustic rather than visual, we might as well be talking about cannon fire on the dark side of the Moon.

Everyone wants a happy, healthy ocean. To get there, though, we have to prioritize oceanic Anthropocene problems. They are at least as important as land-based climate change and biodiversity loss. It all needs to be on the civilizational to-do list.

The reality is that there is only one global environmental crisis: the rapid and widespread disruption of the communities of plants, animals, microbes, and ecosystems of the Earth. We inhabit those communities, and they inhabit us. A warming Earth is a disrupted Earth. And this planet is an ocean planet. Anyone who thinks we can “solve” the crisis without respecting and attending to the health of the oceans doesn’t know how the Earth works.

So much of what must be done to repair our relationship with the oceans has to do with halting greenhouse gas emissions and at least partially reversing the climate change that has occurred. The climate-related “deadly trio” of ocean warming, acidification, and deoxygenation, if allowed to continue at their current pace, are a precursor to a mass extinction. There’s a lot to do to backtrack from that path.

While that’s going on, though, there are easier tasks for us to take on. We can ease our burden on the oceans by managing fisheries sustainably at a habitat scale, strictly reducing ocean pollution from ship and shore, limiting plastic production and pollution, controlling nutrient run-off from agriculture, and more. The easiest task of all, though, is to reduce our noise pollution, which by itself would significantly improve conditions for life in the sea. We could, with a little care and effort, allow “marine animals to reestablish their use of ocean sound as a central ecological trait in a healthy ocean,” as a study titled “The Soundscape of the Anthropocene Ocean” explains.

And that brings me back to my list. Last week I discussed seismic airguns and military explosives. This week I’ll wrap up with sonar, shipping, offshore wind farms, and small boat noise.

SONAR

Sonar is an acronym (Sound Navigation and Ranging) for an acoustic technology. Sound waves are emitted underwater and the rate at which the waves return creates a map of the area being scanned. There are different types of sonar, which I won’t get into here, except to mention the difference between active and passive sonar. Active sonar, as I just described, sends out signals and listens for the response. Passive sonar simply listens. In both cases, the most common use is of a naval ship searching for an enemy submarine.

Active sonar can kill. A sound wave is a physical force which, at its most powerful, can cause deafness, rupture lungs, and damage brain tissue, whether whale, fish, or human. At 235 decibels (dB), the strongest military sonar can still register at 140 dB – the volume of a jet at take-off - 300 miles away from its source. Imagine how much life in the ocean lives in that 300 mile range.

The Navy takes the threat of sonar to human divers so seriously that strict protocols, like locking away the keys to the sonar equipment, are in place whenever a diver is in the water near a ship. Alternatively, a naval ship will sometimes use active sonar as a defense against the prospect of an enemy diver.

If the Navy were as attentive to the risks from sonar to marine life, I wouldn’t have much to say here. Every commercial, private, and research ship in the world carries one or more types of sonar, but the strength of military sonar is quite different. I’ve seen it described as “rolling waves of sound” and “an acoustic holocaust.”

According to a 2012 Times article,

the Navy estimates that blasts from its sonars – used in training and to hunt enemy submarines – result in permanent hearing losses for hundreds of sea mammals every year and temporary losses for thousands. All told, annually the injured animals number more than a quarter million.

That’s almost certainly an understatement. A 2021 Guardian article details how Navy activity in the Mariana Islands Training and Testing (MITT) study area has been linked to multiple stranding events by Cuvier’s beaked whales, a deep-diving species. Beaked whales seem particularly prone to sonar-caused strandings, perhaps because the noise causes them to surface too quickly and develop a fatal case of the bends.

Outside the military, multibeam sonar used for surveying by both industrial and scientific vessels was found to have caused the stranding of 100 melon-headed whales in Madagascar. The JONAS project, which focuses on the anthropogenic soundscape in the Atlantic, describes the general impact from sonar this way:

As they attempt to flee the sound, stressed animals may alter their diving pattern, which can trigger physiological changes that lead to stranding. The use of active sonar can cause more resilient cetaceans to avoid the area entirely or cease feeding – even when the sound level is relatively low.

In Roger Payne’s book, Among Whales, he notes that 20th century whalers found that sonar at 3000 hertz not only visualized the whales being hunted, but also panicked them into surfacing more often. The primary use of the sonar, in fact, was “for scaring whales so that they start “panting” at the surface.”

As little as we know about impacts on cetaceans, we know far less about the harm caused by sonar to the fish and invertebrate species that are much more common in the sea than whales and dolphins. With that bigger picture in mind, we need to remember that chronic disruption of marine animals’ basic daily functions can only lead to population-level impacts. If feeding, mating, and communication are more difficult, the species suffers. And each suffering species in turn affects others who live in relation to that species.

What can we do? Unfortunately, there’s no new technology arriving to replace sonar. And submarine warfare seems here to stay. The best remedy is a set of limits for sonar use, wherever possible. Intense active sonar should only be allowed when precautions are in place and the benefit is extraordinary. And the most sensitive areas - with known populations of whales and dolphins, say - should be protected from sonar use altogether. There has been some successful litigation on this front.

Other harm-reduction strategies, particularly for military sonar, include searching the impact area before and during operations for cetaceans; slowly ramping up the sonar signal as a warning; and not operating at night. These are small, largely ineffective actions, but they’re doable.

In short, we need to respect ocean life enough to acknowledge that sonar kills, injures, frightens, and disrupts far more than we’re observing, and then act in the most empathetic manner possible while assessing if what we’re doing is important enough to justify the constant deep and abiding harm that comes from our desire to see in the dark.

SHIPPING

The worst sounds in the ocean may be from seismic airguns, naval sonar, and military explosions, but the International Maritime Organization (IMO) admits that most of our “continuous anthropogenic noise in the ocean” is generated by shipping. Remember the recording I provided last week of orca calls in the Port of Vancouver being drowned out by a passing ship? And remember the Marine Traffic map of ~60,000 active ships from two weeks ago, and the “oceanic smog” of noise created by the 60,000 commercial ships at sea at any given moment? Now imagine how far shipping noise radiates out from each of those 60,000 ships, how intense it is in the main shipping lanes, and how much of the ocean it covers.

Since truly changing the airgun/sonar/military ocean soundscape in the forseeable future seems unlikely, perhaps the greatest progress in reducing oceanic noise pollution can be made simply by redesigning and refitting ships.

Let’s start with hulls and engines, which play a small but important acoustic role. Engine noise can be dampened with vibration control measures and soundproofing in the engine compartment. Better yet, newer diesel-electric or other integrated electric propulsion engines are much quieter than old throbbing diesel engines. Even better, battery-electric systems reduce engine noise almost completely.  And as that last link demonstrates, emissions reduction goals for the marine industry have jump-started a whole new market for electric ships.

As for hulls, the entire history of ships and boats is marked by a desire to maximize speed, power, and cargo capacity. Noise, an issue that accompanied the shift from sails to motors, has been an afterthought until now. The solutions for quieter hull designs are straightforward (for naval architects), but while some retrofitting is possible the biggest improvements will have to wait for the next generation of quieter vessels. Ships exist for decades, though, so the turnover will be slow.

The main influence on noise by hull design is not its shape in the water but how it shapes the flow of water toward the propeller(s). Which brings me to cavitation, the main culprit in shipping noise. Cavitation, which is essentially the constant creation and explosion of air bubbles around the churning propeller, also makes propulsion less efficient and degrades the propeller itself.

Cavitation has been a problem since the earliest propeller-driven ships were built in the 1830s. Propeller technology, oddly enough, hasn’t changed much in that time. Until recently, it’s been tweaked rather than completely reimagined.

Propeller design discussion can be very, very wonky, if you’re so inclined. For my purposes here, I’ll note that shipping companies are under pressure to reduce carbon emissions, so there’s an interest in finding new propeller and propulsion designs that use less energy without losing speed. The good news is that less cavitation means less noise as well as lower energy use and more efficiency. The IMO explains that

Cavitation can be reduced under normal operating conditions through good design, such as optimizing propeller load, ensuring as uniform water flow as possible into propellers (which can be influenced by hull design), and careful selection of the propeller characteristics such as: diameter, blade number, pitch, skew and sections.

Big ships need a new generation of quieter propellers. The time is ripe for that transition. And we need to target the worst maritime offenders, since half of shipping noise comes from just 15% of vessels. There seems to be good news on the horizon, as evidenced by these German researchers working “to make silent propulsion a standard for the global fleet,” and radical new propeller designs like these from Sharrow and Promarin (though these are still for small boats).

And then there’s the romantic option of making the old new again, by returning shipping to its origins in the days of sail.

At the same time, there are other simple solutions to shipping noise that can be established now. These are largely commonsense steps, already proven, that require only a bit of wise policy rooted in ecological awareness and a basic empathy for marine life. These include rerouting ships, reducing activity, or enforcing noise limits in Marine Protected Areas and Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas, or at important seasonal events like spawning.

The simplest solution for reducing noise near shore is to slow ships down. The ECHO program in the Port of Vancouver found that “lower ship speeds reduce the underwater noise generated at the vessel source as well as total underwater noise in nearby habitats, potentially improving foraging conditions.” Likewise, one study of Mediterranean shipping between 2007 and 2015 demonstrated that slowing the speed of noisy vessels from 15.6 to 13.8 knots cut noise by 50%. That’s a pretty amazing improvement for reducing speed by less than 2 knots.

Not that we needed more evidence that slowing down the pace of human civilization would benefit the life around us, but there it is.

WIND FARMS

While solar is the primary renewable energy source remaking the energy market, wind power generation continues to grow rapidly. Offshore wind, in particular, is estimated to reach 238 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, triple its global capacity in 2024. Even wind energy projects in the U.S., despite interference from the Trump administration, is planning another 5.8 GW of offshore wind by 2029.

As far as making noise, ocean-based wind turbines have two contributions: construction noise (anchoring to the sea floor) and operational noise (from turbines and the ships that service them).

Most offshore wind farms consist of fixed turbines standing on large foundations (on the left of the image above). And the worst construction noise for wind turbines is largely from the short-term work of pile-driving those foundations. Pile-driving can be extremely loud – around 220 decibels, more than an oil tanker’s propellers but a bit less than a seismic airgun – and very disturbing to marine life.

There are multiple solutions for mitigating construction noise. For the curious engineers and scientists among you, here’s a comprehensive 40-page document from the Federal Agency for the Conservation of Nature in Germany. For the rest of us, there are a pair of lovely phrases: “Helmholtz resonators,” and “bubble curtains.” To reduce the extreme noise of pile-driving for large monopile foundations or any other underwater construction, one American company, AdBm Technologies, has pioneered an elegant and affordable solution that dampens noise across the sound spectrum. When their Helmholtz resonators are paired with a bubble curtain, which eases the noise at higher frequencies, this solution can reduce overall noise by 25 dB. (Remember that perceived noise is cut in half for every 10 dB reduction.)

Looking ahead, floating turbines are both the future of offshore wind energy (because there’s more wind blowing over deeper waters) and the best solution to construction noise. Floating turbines are built onshore and then towed to sea, where noise is limited to anchoring the turbines with, say, suction-bucket or gravity-based foundations. In waters too deep for pilings, these anchors are connected by cable to the floating turbine. No pile-driving required. Gravity-based foundations are often just massive pre-made concrete blocks. To understand suction-buckets, I recommend this video, if for no other reason than to hear the word “suction-bucket” in a Scottish accent.

A few years ago, only 0.1 GW of the 50 GW of U.S. offshore wind came from floating turbines. The Biden administration (with the Wind Shot initiative) called for another 30 GW to come from floating turbines. While the rest of the world moves ahead, what the offshore industry looks like here in the next decade or two is anyone’s guess, with an intensely corrupt administration and fossil fuel industry flailing desperately (and often illegally) against the physics and economics of the global renewable energy revolution.

Assessing operational noise from wind turbines is a bit complicated, but the first thing to know is that turbines are generally much quieter – at least 10 to 20 dB less, i.e. half or a fourth as loud – than ship noise. The noise originates in the gearbox and other machinery in the nacelle (behind the hub of the turbine’s blades) and from wind action on the entire structure. That above-water noise vibrates the turbine and then emanates from the foundation of the turbine.

“It is very unlikely that operational noise will lead to any injury or even hearing impairment,” one acoustic researcher has said, “but behavioral changes could be a concern.” We know already that offshore wind farm foundations often create an “artificial reef” around which new benthic communities rapidly form. In terms of marine mammal impacts, it’s known that harbor porpoises seem comfortable coexisting with wind farms, but for whales and other cetaceans their willingness to be near wind turbines is unclear.

The good news is that a) turbines send out far less sound than ships, b) newer drive technology in the nacelle is much quieter, reducing gearbox noise by 75%, and c) floating turbines may dampen turbine noise. The bad news is that a) wind farms are persistent sources, b) new larger turbines are louder than small ones, c) overlapping noise from multiple turbines may create louder cumulative noise, and d) wherever their noise is louder than the natural ambient soundscape they’ll have an impact.

It’s a safe bet, however, that these offshore energy sources are far quieter, far less toxic, and far better for the world overall than the other offshore energy source: oil and gas drilling platforms. Much more research is necessary to tease out the details of the problems and solutions, but it seems likely that with care the offshore wind industry can be maintained as a minor, if large-scale, annoyance.

SMALL BOAT NOISE

Finally, there’s the noise from smaller boats in local waters, whether diesel-powered fishing boats or small skiffs with outboards. Maybe you have a boat and are wondering how to make it quieter and friendlier? The principles I discussed for shipping noise apply here, especially noise from engines and propellers. And the solutions are much the same: new hybrid or electric motors, and better propeller design.

Innovations have flourished since I first wrote on this topic in 2023. Alongside the new cavitation-reducing propellers from Sharrow (toroidal) and Promarin (multi-bladed and reshaped) are Oscar Propulsion’s PressurePores propellers (with small holes on the blade edges), other brands with flexible composite propeller materials rather than steel or bronze, and more. Taken together, these props are the first real reimagining of propeller design in the last 180 years. They seem to significantly reduce cavitation, increase fuel efficiency, and improve thrust. It really seems like the revolution we need to remove most propeller noise from the oceans, though I’ve seen very little information that the technologies are being scaled up for use on large ships. (Sharrow now has the VEEM, up to a 25 inch diameter, for bigger boats.)

The market for electric outboards, too, has opened up. I highlighted Torqeedo a few years ago, but a quick search brings up several companies offering a range of electric boat motors, like Elco, Newport, Flux, ePropulsion, and more. Even mainstream Mercury now has an electric series. Torqeedo’s offerings include a whole inboard electric propulsion system too.

The electric outboards may be about to transform what it means to play or work in small boats. They’re much lighter, simpler, cleaner, better-smelling, and quieter, and you never need to purchase fuel again. If you’re thinking about, say, a small outboard for a dinghy, check out this chatty video review of a tiny 3HP Torqeedo outboard which is so quiet that the reviewer can chat to the camera without interruption while zipping along.

The problem, though, is cost. Things look a little better than a few years ago, but the market for this stuff is still small and high-end. It’s not yet being mass-produced. Sharrow propellers are $800 to $1000 for small outboards and climb steeply from there for larger outboards and medium-size vessels. The Torqeedo 3HP outboard is about $2,500, and their 25HP outboard costs $12,500. (If you have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw around, you have plenty of elite options. Check out the Dasher electric yacht or SilentJet hybrid diesel-electric engine from Hinckley Yachts.) Still, paying more for a 20 HP outboard that’s quiet, clean, ecologically intelligent, and that never needs fuel may well be worth it, if you can afford the upfront cost.

We need policies and strategies to push the market down to the rest of us. If, for example, California were to pass legislation that 1) incentivized innovation in order to slowly phase out loud propeller designs and gas-powered outboards on small boats, and 2) required shipping companies using CA ports to move toward quieter container ships and tankers, that might be a big enough lever to eventually boost production and change the noise much of the world makes in the water.

In the meantime, if you’re still using an old 2-stroke outboard, it should really be retired and upgraded at least to a 4-stroke engine. 4-strokes are much quieter, more fuel-efficient, and much less likely to leak gas and oil into the water. But an electric outboard is the future. Imagine a clean, quiet boat with no fuel to manage, and a happier marine community beneath your boat.

Why Be Harmful?

Even if the science on our noise impacts in the ocean is thinner than policy makers would like, we should act in the best interest of life. At this stage of the Anthropocene, we’re long past the time when we need to wait for the kind of slow, careful analysis forced upon scientists and society by industries looking to protect their polluting status quo.

The fossil fuel companies have delayed the necessary restructuring of civilization for decades, and that’s time we did not have. Future generations will pay the price that even now is coming due. Regarding our excessive noise in the oceans, as with all our impacts on living communities, we must act based on a commonsense and rational precautionary principle. Why be harmful when we can reduce that harm?

Lots of good work is being done on ocean noise, from NOAA’s Ocean Noise Strategy Roadmap, the International Maritime Organization’s noise guidelines, the Saturn project on underwater noise, and the ECHO program at Port of Vancouver. Alongside the rebound of some whale populations, and efforts to create Marine Protected Areas, reduce ocean pollution, and create an international treaty for the protection of ocean biodiversity, there’s a fair amount of good news for the oceans. But it’s only a start.

“Cutting noise is possibly the lowest-hanging fruit to make a difference and we can change that today,” a marine biologist told the Guardian: “I have real hope that we will hear a healthier ocean in our lifetimes.”

That would be a good thing for all of life, including our own. To get there, we need to get off the radio and let life sing its songs without our industrial static. It’s all part of redesigning civilization so that it benefits, rather than disrupts, life on Earth.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

From the Times, another good reason to reduce urban light pollution. New research finds that light pollution lengthens plants’ season for producing pollen by up to four months, increases ragweed growth, and makes us more prone to developing allergies.

From Live Science, good news on mangrove forests, which are rebounding worldwide. New research analyzed 40 years of satellite imagery and found that while mangroves declined precipitously from the 1980s to the early 2000s, they’ve been regrowing (through both natural and human efforts) since 2010.

From Phenomenal World, “Dawn of the Electric World Order,” an excellent if slightly wonky overview of how the U.S./Israeli disastrous war in Iran is rapidly accelerating the global transition to renewable energy and electrification of everything. Here’s their opening paragraph:

Oil and gas—the foundation of global systems of energy and production—are no longer reliably available where and when they are needed at bearable prices. Two wars in four years have triggered a permanent risk regime shift. No matter how uneven and uncertain the immediate reaction from markets and governments, the lesson of the present energy shock is unavoidable: the geopolitical conditions that once stabilized the carbon-based logistics of the modern world can no longer be guaranteed, and electrification offers a structural exit from instability.

From Grist, “The hidden cost of owning an EV: expensive insurance,” finds that insurance companies are charging 42% more, on average in the U.S., to insure EVs, in large part because amid this great transition in vehicle technology, they are still more expensive to fix. The extra insurance cost varies wisely from state to state (and amid countries in the E.U.), but the good news for my Maine readers is that our state has the smallest cost increase in the country.

From Yale e360, how natural “smellscapes” (the ecological landscape of smells) are being disrupted by air pollution and other human chemical interventions. Like noise pollution and habitat loss, our chemical pollution is interfering with species’ capacity to communicate, navigate, feed, and reproduce.

From the Biomimicry Institute and their AskNature podcast, a short interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer that touches on how to relate to and learn from nature, and what that teaches us about reimagining society along natural principles:

It may seem simplistic to say, ‘Well, what we need is a different story.’ But what is it that has changed and guided us through history? It’s stories.

I can say, ‘I am going to live as if the world is a gift for which I need to be grateful, for which I need to reciprocate, for whom I am accountable.’

And if I change my mind, I can align my behaviors with that story.

From Orion, the Orion questionnaire with ethnobotanist, activist, and writer Gary Paul Nabhan, in which he playfully replies to a host of personal questions about his relationship with the real, natural world. When asked, for example, whether he’d like to go to space, he replied:

I would jump at going into the space of a rainforest canopy, into the miniscule microbial nursery called a vinegar mother, or the benthic depths of the ocean. There are many undiscovered spaces among us. I am already extraterrestrial, so I want to become a better earthling, not an alien.

From Earth Hope, “One man, one million cars’ worth of pollution eliminated,” a lovely account of former oil company executive Curtis Shuck and the Well Hope Foundation, which is quietly busy using grant money and donations to do the essential work of plugging abandoned oil and gas wells. Governments’ failure to hold the industry accountable has led to millions of orphaned wells emitting methane and contaminating groundwater. Shuck takes them on, one at a time, and has plugged 120 wells in 15 states so far, with the enormous benefits noted in the article’s title. It’s a fine reminder of how much one person can do.

Share

Hello everyone:

Given my topic these few weeks, I thought I’d note that World Oceans Day is this Monday, June 8th. Find an event near you, and check out the U.N.’s beautiful video announcement about why celebrating the ocean matters.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

The Crowded Radio Dial

Oddly enough, I first learned about bioacoustics in the quietest place on Earth: Antarctica. In the late 1990s, a researcher/composer/sound artist named Douglas Quin visited McMurdo Station to do some pioneering studies on the underwater soundscape in McMurdo Sound. At that point, I’d never thought about sound as a structural component of ecological communities, but Quin explained that animal species who rely on sound create their own space on the audio spectrum. To thrive, they need to hear and be heard. This is particularly true in dense habitats, like a rainforest, where the cacophony of animal noise is like a crowded radio dial. Each sound-dependent bird, animal, or insect species evolves their own radio station.

In Antarctic waters, though, there are very few species. The opportunity for those species to broadcast is extraordinary. And no animal takes more advantage of this than the Weddell seal. They can be heard making the most otherworldly sounds all across the dial (and beyond – some of their sounds are ultrasonic).

Take a listen to a quick clip here:

For the full experience, though, try a full two-hour immersion in Weddell seal singing, complete with video spectrogram. I very highly recommend giving it a listen. It’s beautiful and bewildering. As a reminder of how well sound travels underwater, most of the seals in this long recording were a half-mile away from the hydrophone.

If you can, consider listening to this recording as you read the rest of this essay. Keep the volume low, though; there are some loud surprises.

Haunted by Leaf Blowers

The natural acoustic environment of today’s oceans has evolved over at least 40 to 50 million years. The animals of the ocean, whether whale or coral polyp, sole or grouper, alewife or anchovy, have likewise had millions of years to evolve within that environment. Humans aren’t very good at contemplating millions of years, but take a moment to consider how incredibly small a single century is amid those millions. (A hundred years is .0022% of 45 million years.)

That century is all it has taken modern culture to drown out much of the ocean chorus.

It's as if the crowded oceanic radio dial with its marvelous diversity of music has been overpowered by a single station broadcasting engine noise and explosions for an audience that isn’t listening. Because we’re not underwater, we don’t hear the problem we’re making.

And as I noted last week, we forget that sound is an essential part of living for other species. To hear one very common example of the problem, listen to this 25-second clip from the Port of Vancouver, documenting orcas trying to communicate as a ship passes. (Check your volume before you click: the audio is loud.)

To empathize, simply imagine the most annoying or disruptive environmental noises in our lives: construction areas, chain saws and motorcycles, heavy traffic, trains rattling by and planes taking off. We all deal with noise, but not the way it’s experienced underwater in the noisiest places (day and night in shipping lanes and ports), where it has been pervasive, dominant, and increasing over the last several decades.

Because we’re not there listening, and because we’re sight-dependent apes who don’t really know what it means to be a sound-dependent fish, mammals, or invertebrates, we also don’t understand that in some cases our noise pollution can have population-scale impacts. Our noise not only impacts individuals, but also threatens entire species, habitats, and ecosystems. Imagine an army of leaf-blowers haunting your neighborhood day and night, all year long, for your entire life, making it hard to feed, mate, and raise your young.

Here’s a helpful infographic with four comparative ocean soundscapes: the natural, the noisy, and two imagined futures:

Worse Than You Think

A tugboat in motion is loud, producing about 170 decibels (dB). An oil tanker is even louder, at about 200 dB. But nothing comes close to a seismic airgun at 250 dB, which can be heard underwater over an area of 115,000 square miles.

For a landlubber reference, a gas-powered leaf blower is about 75 dB from fifty feet away, 100 dB if you’re running it. Thunderclaps and running chainsaws hit our ears at about 110-120 dB. If you were 25 meters away from a jet on take-off, your eardrums might be ruptured by the 150 dB it produces.

Anything below 70 dB is considered safe (if still annoying) for human ears, but remember that sound travels four to five times faster and farther underwater, and that a lot of marine life has more sensitive hearing than we do. (Adding insult to injury, a warming ocean transmits sound even faster.)

But the final kicker in this decibel data I’m throwing at you is that decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale, which means that the numbers I listed above are far worse than you thought. Loudness doubles for every extra 10 decibels. Thus, a sound 20 dB higher than another is four times louder, and a sound 30 dB greater is eight times louder. A seismic airgun at 250 dB is 100 dB greater than a jet at take-off and thus about a thousand times louder.

There are three problems with human noise underwater. The primary one is that, in much of the ocean, our noise is everywhere and all the time. The second problem is that much of our noise occurs on the same frequencies needed by the broad and beautiful variety of ocean life. And third is the incredible loudness of our worst noise, particularly sonar and airguns. (Loudness is not inherently unnatural. Those of you listening to the Weddell seals won’t be surprised to know that some of their noises rival the dB of a jet engine.)

Here’s some NOAA audio of seismic airguns. Incredibly, what you’ll hear is being emitted about 1500 miles from the recording microphone. (For some reason, the recording has been sped up 10x. Airgun blasts are typically spaced about 10-15 seconds apart):

But for the full effect, listen to this 16-second clip of a single blast, up close, followed by the clicks of echosounders:

Some Solutions

So what can we do about our noise in the oceans? Solutions, such as they are, come in three categories: noise avoidance (stopping the noise), noise reduction (improving technology so less noise is created), and noise-quieting (making the sound harder to hear).

Let’s take the offenders one at a time, starting with the loudest.

SEISMIC AIRGUNS

The noise from seismic airguns dominates the ocean soundscape. It is essentially an echolocating technology, borrowed from marine mammals and now heedlessly weaponized against them, every ten seconds for weeks or months at a time for any given survey, with a hundred or more ships doing these surveys around the globe each year.

Just this week, an excellent interactive Times article explains in a series of illustrations how seismic surveys in the Gulf of Mexico fill the region with noise and impact the tiny remaining population of endangered Rice’s whales. The article allows you to hear the noise of seismic surveys overlapping with the calls of Rice’s whales, and visualizes the distance that noise travels and where the whales have gone to hide from it.

As we all know, the future of life on Earth will be shaped by whether we stop searching for fossil fuels and leave most of those carbon-rich substances in the ground. One benefit of that is never discussed: The faster we wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the faster the primary use of seismic airguns will become obsolete.

To get there, we need to continue making policy that 1) accelerates the energy transition, 2) reduces energy consumption and plastic production, and 3) makes the offshore search for fossil fuels harder to permit. These are beyond the scope of this essay, but I can at least point to the now incredibly rapid rise of renewables - solar, wind, batteries in particular - across the globe. (We are much better, though, at reimagining consumption than reducing it.)

I’d like to say that there has never been a better time to push for strict regulation of airgun use. But there are two realities getting in the way. First, here in the U.S. the Trump administration is burning hundreds of billions in a desperate attempt to bolster an industry that knows its time is limited. That effort will fail eventually - though not soon enough - because the economics of energy now favor renewables. And that’s the second reality: It’s quite likely that a decline in investment by banks for oil and gas exploration will succeed where policy has not. Since seismic airguns exist mostly to search out new fossil fuel deposits below the sea floor, their usage will diminish as investments shrink.

To the extent that fossil fuel prospecting and other research continue, though, a better technology is required. The answer there may be marine vibroseis, which uses a vibrating diaphragm-like device to send a similar but milder dose of energy into the sea floor. The sound is spread over a longer wavelength with a deep hum rather than a loud bang. These machines “gently” vibrate the seabed rather than violently disturbing the entire water column. Testing has begun, but the technology is still unproven, in part because it has been underfunded and understudied. An old article in Hakai explains how the inventor of seismic airguns developed marine vibroseis as a solution to the problem he created.

MILITARY EXPLOSIONS

Only military explosions, mainly from training and testing exercises, shake up the ocean soundscape more than seismic airguns. To give one example, a 2018 press release from the Center for Biological Diversity noted that permits issued to the Navy for a five-year period would “harm marine mammals 12.5 million times” in waters off California and Hawaii. This includes damage from sonar and ship strikes too.

Occasionally the Navy uses major explosions to shock-test ships. These will kill or damage fish, invertebrates, and marine mammals that are miles away. And as I detailed last week, Russia’s unprovoked war in Ukraine – with extreme noise levels from explosions and sonar – has been absolutely devastating for dolphins and other marine animals.

Because of the scale and institutional nature of the powers at work here, again we’re dependent on good policy to put protections in place. The good news is that constant vigilance (and lawsuits) from environmentalists and conservation-minded politicians has prompted the Navy to include marine mammal safety in their planning. The shock-test I mentioned above, for example, included extensive planning and surveying (before, during, and after) by a team of observers, researchers, and veterinarians. And a recent permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service for the Navy in the waters off the U.S. northwest requires some additional protective measures.

That said, these measures are merely softening the brutal status quo rather than reducing the large-scale harm. Those observers are watching for whales and dolphins within a kilometer or so of the ship, though the explosion was audible for thousands of miles.

Short of reducing naval activity or convincing the Navy to do their training and testing via computer simulation, there’s not much else to be done other than continuing to push for greater restrictions on where, when, and how the explosions are done.

That’s it for now. Next week I’ll explore the harms and solutions related to sonar, shipping noise (propellers especially), wind farms, private boats, and more. Stay tuned to this topic, especially if you own a boat. I’ll dig into options for quieting your own presence on the water.

For now, remember that like the songs of Weddell seals, our presence on the planet can be strange – even bizarre – without being so harmful.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

As always, there is the astonishing and Death & Birds, and this week it is “Sometimes… I am the sea,” a gorgeous short ode to the importance of paying attention to real life. Chloe sings in her chains like the sea (as Dylan Thomas advised), and brings us sentences to swim toward amid the chop and swell of this life:

When we do not share a language with the beings we love most in the world, they themselves become a language we must learn. What cannot be spoken must be sensed; listened for through eyes, skin and the vast catalogue our bodies keep of the many thousands of tiny observations that love sees us make.

From and between two seas, “learning to save a whale,” another beautiful post from the Orkneys, this one detailing a day spent being trained to respond to strandings of marine mammals. Rebecca articulates both the work and its meaning beautifully:

I will carry this story around with me like a talisman, a guard against the pervasive sense that the world is becoming less kind, that people are becoming less kind, because if ordinary folk will put themselves through this, through three hours rocking waist-deep in a dark and stormy ocean, for the chance that they might give a porpoise a second chance at life (the porpoise did re-find his balance and swim back to the deep)—well, then there is light.

From the Times, a lovely little story about a pair of endangered New Zealand parakeets - kākāriki karaka, to be precise - who have been so busy mating and successfully raising chicks (55 in the last two years) that they’ve increased the population of their species by more than 10%.

From Inside Climate News, a good-news account of how the vast, beautiful Okefenokee swamp on the Georgia/Florida border is close to being given UNESCO World Heritage Site status. The Okefenokee is the largest blackwater swamp in North America, five times the size of Atlanta, inhabited by 250 bird species and 64 reptile species, including an estimated 15,000 alligators. It’s built on thousands of years of slowly accumulated peat, a rarity in the subtropics.

From bioGraphic, a timely article on how the Trump administration’s tariffs are motivating Canada to seek other trade partners, which means increased shipping in the St. Lawrence Seaway, which in turn means far more noise and other threats to marine life. As always, bioGraphic does a great job of writing well about the natural world and our threats to it, and in this case that means noting how much impact ocean noise can have:

Though charismatic creatures like whales are the poster children for the issue, sonic pollution impacts everything along the food chain. “All animals, from mussel larvae to whales, are potentially affected by noise,” Cauchy says.

From Anthropocene, “Does Energy Efficiency Reduce Carbon Emissions?,” a fascinating discussion of how major gains in efficiency may or may not be leading toward a low-carbon future. One of the principles in question here is whether or not the Jevons Paradox - a 19th century observation of how efficiency often leads to increased consumption - will apply to an electrified world powered by renewables.

Share Field Guide to the Anthropocene

Hello everyone:

(Apologies for a second email, but the first went out by mistake with an early draft. This is the full version. You can discard the previous email.)

I’m away for most of this week and the next two, and so I’ve revisited, revised, and updated my three-part series on our ocean noise. It’s from three and a half years ago, when I had a tenth of my current readership, so it should be new for most of you. I think it’s one of my more interesting and lesser-known topics; let me know what you think.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

Sound is Light

I did some autobiographical math some time ago and realized that, despite having traveled widely, I’ve spent nearly my entire life within a few miles of the ocean. I can scarcely think of a time when I was away from a shoreline for more than a few months. Even in Antarctica, I spent most of my time on the edge of Earth’s southernmost port.

The ocean is an odd magnet for me, though. I don’t fish or sail, and despite a childhood in coastal Maine and Cape Cod I have never liked lounging on the beach with other pale flotsam. I’m drawn more to moving along its rough edges than to exploring the sea itself. Here in Maine I canoe between islands, and I walk shorelines. I walk, poke at natural things, pick them up and put them down, collect plastic fragments to throw away elsewhere, and stare out across the water before moving along again.

There’s a quiet, happy restlessness in my best relationship with the water’s edge, as if I’m reflecting back the wave energy lapping at my feet. But there’s a calmness too, the constantly renewing gift of that open horizon. The sea “sings in its chains,” per Dylan Thomas, and even in its most destructive surges that song feels to me like a lullaby.

Most of us experience the ocean as a visual spectacle, a vast and restless body for us to gaze upon, swim in, travel across, and occasionally look longingly into its depths. But the ocean is not the shallow sunlit edges we know. It is mostly those dark depths, a deep, dense, permanent night we have scarcely visited, much less mapped.

As a marine scientist says in an excellent short film from the Economist on deep sea mining, “If you’re thinking about what have we actually looked at on the sea floor, it’s less than 0.001%.” Only the top 150 to 200 meters of the ocean receive enough light for photosynthesis, and this sunlit zone only makes up 2% to 3% of the oceans. The “midnight zone,” starting 1000 meters deep, makes up 90%.

However little we know, we know a lot more now than when Rachel Carson asked, in her 1937 essay “Undersea,” “Who has known the ocean?”

Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere.

But sinking beneath the waves and opening your eyes doesn’t get you very far. The ocean realm is, for its inhabitants, a world often experienced less by sight and more by smell and sound. Fish and sharks might, for example, see a hundred feet, and smell something thousands of feet away, but they can hear a loud noise from miles away. Everything from plankton and corals to orcas and humpback whales rely on their acoustic perception. As one researcher told the Guardian,

Sound is light in the oceans. It illuminates the ocean for many animals.

A report from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) explains further:

Many fishes, and at least some invertebrates, depend on sound to communicate with one another, detect prey and predators, navigate from one place to another, avoid hazards, and generally respond to the world around them.

Polluting the Whole Spectrum

Which leads me to an anthropogenic problem that’s not often discussed: our excessive underwater noise. From the point of view of ocean life, we are an incredibly loud and obnoxious neighbor, and we are everywhere. Shipping, military activity, oil and gas drilling, seismic exploration, fishing, wind farm construction, pleasure boating, whale-watching, and much more all create an underwater cacophony. The variety of sources - like large ships emitting low frequency noise, and small ships emitting high frequency noise - means that we pollute the whole spectrum.

Our relentless contamination of the soundscape changes feeding behavior, reduces reproductive success, impairs communication, and makes some areas unlivable. Imagine living with neighbors running their leaf blowers all day and night, all year long: that’s us.

The good news is that much of this can be reduced. Unlike other ocean threats - the overharvesting of fish, destruction of seafloor habitats from bottom trawling, the threat of deep seafloor mining, chemical and nutrient pollution, and especially the “deadly trio” (climate-related warming, acidification, and deoxygenation) - our noise problem in the ocean is in some ways a quick-fix, on/off problem. Parts of the problem are among the few low-hanging fruit of the Anthropocene crisis.

Even better news: When we reduce our noise, conditions for life in the ocean immediately improves. Becoming quieter in the sea increases biodiversity and fisheries productivity in inshore waters and improves the likelihood of survival for the large and charismatic keystone species (whales, dolphins, tuna, etc.) who are essential for a healthy ocean.

Here’s a helpful illustration of the ocean soundscape in the Anthropocene:

Acoustic Daylight

The ocean is an ideal acoustic environment. Sound travels about 1500 meters per second underwater, four to five times faster and farther than in air.

To live a normal life, marine mammals, fish, and invertebrates need “acoustic daylight” – my new favorite phrase – which is simply a quiet-enough environment to clearly hear and communicate. (If you’re an introvert, I’m sure you can relate…)

Large-scale acoustic daylight is particularly necessary for whales, as an NPR article pointed out:

Humpbacks are a chatty bunch. In addition to their well-known, melodious songs, they make "whups" and other noises, either to coordinate feeding or simply to stay in touch with each other. Sound can travel for miles underwater, sometimes hundreds of miles, much farther than a whale can see. “Whales use sound in almost every aspect of their daily life," [wildlife biologist Christine Gabriele] says. "Studying the underwater sound environment is really important because it helps us see the world the way the whales actually use it.”

Humpback whales have a music culture, with new songs sweeping through different populations around the world at different times. But, as the NPR article noted, that culture is harder to maintain now:

“More needs to be done," says Jason Gedamke, who manages the ocean acoustics program at NOAA Fisheries. "When you have animals that for millions of years have been able to communicate over vast distances in the ocean, and then once we introduce noise and have increased sound levels and they can't communicate over those distances, clearly there's going to be some impact there.”

“Vast distances” is not hyperbole. Whale song can travel for thousands of miles under the right circumstances. Those circumstances are called the SOFAR channel, a horizontal layer in the oceans (defined by temperature) which acts as a guide for low frequency sounds. Sound can be transmitted like a skipping stone for thousands of miles along this natural phenomenon. The “Heard Island Experiment” in 1991 emitted a signal from the Southern Ocean through the SOFAR channel, and it was heard at sixteen listening stations around this ocean planet, including Bermuda and Monterey.

Better, Quieter Neighbors

The ocean is a vast, dark place that’s notoriously difficult to study. How do we know that our noise is impacting life in the sea? From some scientific observations of those impacts, certainly, and some common sense, but also from opportunities to observe what happens when we become better, quieter neighbors.

After the 9/11 attacks shut down shipping on the U.S. east coast, stress hormone levels in North Atlantic right whales dropped. Twenty years later, cortisol levels decreased significantly for humpbacks in Antarctic waters when the pandemic kept the annual mob of 73,000 whale-watchers at home. At the same time, pregnant loggerhead turtles in Greek waters could enjoy the warmer shallows because they were no longer driven away by swimmers. Likewise, water quality, fish populations, and biodiversity all increased when Hawaii’s Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve kept the snorkelers away for nine months. And an early observation in the Port of Vancouver as the pandemic shutdown began found that noise levels were cut in half, making it easier for local orca pods to echolocate their prey.

The pandemic was an unprecedented opportunity to collect data in a quiet ocean and, in retrospect, to empathize with life in the sea. Having experienced the shutdowns ourselves, we can imagine the subsurface shift toward silence. We heard the decrease in traffic and the increase in birdsong, so we can understand how fish, mammals, and invertebrates would thrive in decreased cacophony.

The pandemic experiment in calming the oceans may not be repeated soon, but we shouldn’t ignore the truth about its benefits, or about our ability to make them permanent. As one conservation biologist told the Times, “No one can say anymore that we can’t change the whole world in a year, because we can. We did.”

An Ecocidal War

As global civilization surged back into motion, our noisy activity reestablished the underwater version of what ecologists call a “landscape of fear.” The term generally describes the impact of predators on prey behavior, but it also describes how so many species have to cope with or avoid our overwhelming noisy presence. On land, this is especially true around roads and highways. At sea, it’s everywhere.

The worst kind of acute ocean impacts have occurred in the Black Sea because of Russia’s war on Ukraine. A truly disturbing article from Mongabay about the ecocidal impact of the war explains that an armada of Russian ships and submarines with powerful sonar, not to mention incredibly loud explosions from the bombing of ships and ports, killed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of dolphins and other cetaceans. They began washing up in unprecedented numbers immediately after the war began.

There was simply no escape for the dolphins, with their incredibly sensitive hearing, in a war zone full of fast-moving, deep, low, violent explosions. I imagine what the dolphins experienced was like holding a stethoscope up to a jackhammer. Such violent noise causes physical damage, often fatal, to marine animals’ bodies, especially their ears.

No one knows what the final ecological toll will be, but the war is certainly removing far too many keystone species and likely destabilizing the Black Sea ecosystem, already at-risk, for generations to come.

Marine Traffic

What’s happening in waters off Ukraine is particularly ugly, but it’s only an extreme version of our Anthropocene soundscape.

How bad is the problem globally? It’s hard to say with precision, because the ocean is vast and the research is underfunded, but we know enough to know we should be changing our behavior. And we’ve known it for a while. As a 2021 Guardian article noted:

The damage caused by noise is as harmful as overfishing, pollution and the climate crisis, the scientists said, but is being dangerously overlooked. The good news, they said, is that noise can be stopped instantly and does not have lingering effects, as the other problems do.

That article was based on an analysis, “The soundscape of the Anthropocene ocean,” which analyzed over 500 studies on the impact of human noise on ocean life. Around 90% of the studies measured significant harm to marine mammals like whales, seals and dolphins. 80% of the studies noted impacts on invertebrates and fish. The Guardian cited some details:

The most obvious impact is the link between military sonar and seismic survey detonations and deafness, mass strandings, and deaths of marine mammals. But many uses of sound can be harmed, such as the hums that male toadfish use to attract females and the honks that cod use to coordinate spawning.

Baleen whales produce calls to help group cohesion and reproduction that can travel across ocean basins, and humpback whales sing complex mating songs that have regional dialects. Sperm whales and various dolphins and porpoises use sonar to echolocate prey. Other animals use sound to feed: some shrimps produce a “snap” sound to stun prey.

Over the past half century, the steady increase in shipping has made the amount of low-frequency noise on major cargo routes more than 30 times worse. It’s doubled every decade since the 1960s.

There are at least 60,000 commercial vessels at sea as you read this. That’s a mind-boggling number, but it’s only a partial accounting, since it doesn’t include some of the loudest offenders, like military ships and oil rigs, nor the vast numbers of local fishing and pleasure craft. For an astonishing real-time glimpse of just those commercial vessels, though, you can monitor them at Marine Traffic. Zoom in on any place on Earth where ships are sailing, and click on the icons for each vessel to learn more about it. The image above is a snapshot.

In contrast to the cheerful notion of “acoustic daylight,” the noise created by the legions of ships has been described as an “oceanic smog.” Coastal waters and oil/gas exploration zones are generally the noisiest areas, often dominating the natural ambient soundscape. The low-frequency wall of sound from shipping comes from the engines, the rippling of water around the hull, and especially from propellers. Scientists working around the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, for example, have learned that consistent motorboat noise can double the mortality for fish unable to hear predators.

Airguns and Sonar

Seismic airguns are used by the oil and gas industry (and by research vessels) to map the sea floor and the geology deep beneath it. Long rows of airguns are towed behind a vessel, releasing explosions of compressed air that are as loud as a jet at takeoff. These explosions are emitted every ten seconds, 24 hours a day, sometimes for weeks at a time. This work has been going on for decades, with each blast audible up to 2500 miles away.

One decade-long study found these sounds could be heard throughout much of the Atlantic Ocean up to 80% of the time over the course of a year. The disruption for whales is obvious, but the impacts reach the bottom of the sea and the foundation of the food chain, with one study finding huge impacts on zooplankton (e.g., krill larvae and copepods), which are the foundation of the ocean food web:

The team found that zooplankton abundance dropped by 64% within one hour of the blasts. And the proportion of dead zooplankton increased by 200–300% as far away as 1.2 kilometres — the maximum distance the researchers sampled. This suggests that the impact of the blasts could extend well beyond such distances…

Sonar, meanwhile, is ubiquitous. It’s used on military, research, and cargo vessels, on trawlers and lobster boats, and maybe even on your little fishing boat. Fish-finders, echo sounders, fishing net control sonars, side-scan sonars, multi-beam sonars, and other sonars for mapping the seabed topography are constantly searching the ocean, and while the high-frequency sounds don’t travel as far as low-frequency airgun explosions, and are above the hearing range of most fishes and invertebrates, there are innumerable sonar devices in service, and they are a disturbance to some fish, like shad and menhaden.

We’re Being Noisy Underwater

If I’ve given the impression that the ocean noise problem is limited to the particular sensitivities of sea life, it’s worth remembering that humans can be killed by noise as well. The shock waves from explosions, for example, wreak havoc with our bodies. It’s happening in Ukraine right now. Humans, dolphins, fish, and zooplankton are all soft-bodied creatures in a hard world.

It’s easy to feel that Anthropocene noise is happening in the deep ocean, at some distance from our daily lives, but it’s not that simple. Every time we board a ship, drive a car over a coastal bridge, or sit in a plane taking off over the water from a coastal airport, we’re being noisy underwater. When we purchase items shipped across the ocean, we’re being noisy underwater. When we use energy from offshore oil and gas, or offshore wind farms, we’re being noisy underwater. And when we eat fish caught by bottom trawlers, or any fishing boat, that’s us too. I don’t mean to make us all feel guilty. Rather, I mean to explain that, as with so much in the Anthropocene, we’ve been trapped by the choices offered by an ill-conceived civilization.

But as I’ve mentioned, there are some easy ways to reduce the noise and its impacts. And there’s some good news on the regulatory and technological fronts too. Most importantly, there’s ample evidence that ecosystems bounce back immediately once we become quieter neighbors. We have some solutions for this problem. And that’s what I’ll talk about for the next two weeks.

For now, I highly recommend you watch this excellent, thoughtful video from Vox. It will tie together everything I’ve just told you.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

From and Easy by Nature, “On the Boardwalk at Magee Marsh,” a beautiful depiction of a day spent in a crowded but amazing birding hotspot near Lake Erie. As always, Bill provides stunning bird photos to accompany his thoughtful prose that explores both the wildlife and the importance of the choices we make in their presence.

Likewise, from and Chasing Nature, “Virtue in a Droplet,” another excellent account of Bryan doing remarkable fieldwork in service of seeing, and paying respect to, the details of nature that so few of us have the patience to discover or even pay attention to. Bryan’s field notes from his exploration of the real world - in this case tiny secretions from a parasitic plant in a Vermont bog - are always beautifully photographed and full of good-natured wisdom:

Purpose and grace may wait as well in the backyard, by the roadside, or in a crack in the pavement. It need not be rare or even beautiful — as long as it means something to you. So seek your orchid, your warbler, your butterfly.

From and Conservation Works, “Ecology in the Deepest Sense,” an excellent short editorial on the kind of guardrails we should be putting up around AI. She’s focused on conservation and journalism, but her central idea that these professions require humans to make human connections to best serve their audiences rings true for much of our lives. To this end, she cites Pope Leo’s recent encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas:

Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home. AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible.

From and The Crucial Years, “Just my imagination,” another of his fine personal letters on this era’s crucible in energy and politics. This one digs into the role of the imagination in the climate fight, whether in opening up the minds of those still on the sidelines, waking up politicians to the role they need to play, or just having some fun along the way. McKibben, as always, has a gift for talking open-heartedly about the work ahead:

I confess that I, like the Pope (and that’s a fun phrase to write) have great faith in the powers of the particularly human imagination. Climate change, to me, has always seemed like a test of whether or not the big brain was a sound adaptation: obviously it can get us in a lot of trouble, but can it get us out of that trouble? The longer I live, the more I’m convinced that the answer to that question has mostly to do with the size of the heart that brain is attached to. In the end, “imagination” is about enlarging that heart.

Both McKibben and Anthropocene magazine report on a new study that finds burning coal around the globe not only contributes substantially to the ugly mess that is our warming atmosphere, but also emits enough sulfur particles to weaken solar rays enough to reduce the effectiveness of solar panels by about 6%.

From Nautilus, a short cute good-news story about native species rebounding beautifully on Lord Howe Island in Australia after a successful rat and mouse eradication project. The rodents had been there for a century, and while full recovery will be long and some plant or animal populations may never resemble what they were before the rats arrived, already invertebrate numbers have increased by 50%.

From Vox, an update on the Ocean Census project, which has accelerated the search in the deep oceans for all the life we’ve never seen, but which is threatened by the prospect of deep ocean mining. Take a few minutes to examine the “alien” species of the deep ocean, which remind us how little we know about the Earth amidst our zealous transformation of it. Here, for example, is a likely new species of ping pong ball sponge:

Share

Hello everyone:

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

More Miracle Than Obstacle

Fog, a recent study tells us, is full of life. Bacteria inhabit the water droplets, feeding and reproducing, at a concentration similar to the density of microbial populations in both salt and fresh water. Fog, the authors tell us, should be considered a “potential aquatic microhabitat.” Even floating in a thin veil across an evening meadow, water is the stuff of life.

Fog is, to the fearful imagination, the stuff of lost children and shipwrecks. For a restless species who insists on being able to see everything, all the time, fog is an inconvenience and a metaphor for directionless confusion. One of my most haunting drives was a nighttime crawl through dense Newfoundland fog on fresh black asphalt with no painted lines and deep ditches on either side. The fog was bright in the headlights while the road disappeared beneath; we could scarcely tell we were moving.

To the patient eye, though, fog and mist give shape and substance to the air, settling like sleep on field and pond or rising to dance in tendrils held between light and wind. When we’re in it without timetable or task, fog is more miracle than obstacle. To me, its hush hints at the soft silence behind all reality, and the taste of its damp breath on skin and tongue seems like food and drink for all of life. This new research puts data behind the aesthetics.

The aeroecology of Earth - life lived in the air - is marked primarily by the thousands to millions of bacterial cells occupying every cubic meter of atmosphere. These cells rise from the soil and plants of the green world into the invisible swirls of wind, and form the backbone of most raindrops and ice crystals. As I wrote in “Life is in the Air,” the living rain, snow, dust, and wind are kept company by the astonishing swifts and other birds, by bats, and by flying/migratory insects and airborne newborn spiders whose silk thread sails give additional meaning to the “web” of life.

The Flood

In my decision to write a little about the scale of our knowledge this week, I could have rooted this essay in any of the hundreds of articles that pass before me day after day. Some recent favorites include efforts to “daylight” streams and waterways long buried, the connection between Mennonites and Amazonian deforestation, the horror of “mirror organisms”, and a true understanding of the proton-driven flagellar motor in single-celled bacteria, one of the great evolutionary developments and a key to understanding how all of life works:

This amazing, self-assembling, signal-processing, direction-switching molecular machine is so powerful yet so spare that, billions of years later, it’s still used by bacteria in virtually every gut and puddle on Earth.

My point is that we live in a time of great knowing. Fascinating discoveries come to light every day. Some (like the living fog) are about the beautiful world, some are about our abuse of it, and a few are about our efforts to repair the damage. The raw material of information, and the processed product we call knowledge, are both wondrous and excessive. They flood around us and through us in great torrents that carry us, ironically, toward an unpredictable future. We sip or swig at the flood, depending on our capacity and thirst for knowing, but we no longer live in a time when any of us can hope to master (or even be aware of) more than a fraction of what has been learned.

Science is a learning system, the most consequential that our species has invented. I might agree that it’s the best way of knowing ourselves, the Earth, and our galactic context, if it weren’t for the relentless destruction of life that has accompanied it. All the wise and thoughtful scientists I know are dedicated to the path of pure science - the optimistic quest for knowledge - but science is only an advisor to Anthropocene culture, not its guide. A culture that strips the Earth for parts will always scavenge pure science for paths to profit and power, leaving its higher motives to gather dust in academic journals.

made a similar point in his recent series of posts on plant intelligence, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the fate of the Black Hills:

Science can be a powerful, fascinating, and for those that practice it, immensely enriching undertaking. But, in the absence of respectful, mutual relationship with the more-than-human, it can result in great harm.

The problem is that science, like democracy, does not come naturally to us. They are both smarter than we are, both aspirational ideas invented by, but not wholly embraced by, several billion story-driven social apes who are as irrational as the scientific method is rational.

Writer Terry Pratchett reminds us that science is less about facts than about seeing the world clearly. “It is,” he says,

a method of asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good.

But I wonder sometimes if the sheer volume of the flood keeps us trapped in our comfy beliefs. If science is a river too deep and fast to swim, and if its genius is too often co-opted by industrial profit-driven forces we cannot resist, then we spend most of our lives sitting on the bank of the river, marveling at or afraid of what we do not understand.

Each year, up to five million science papers (and other scholarly works) are published. Likewise, over four million books. Then there is the cascade of articles, reviews, interviews, etc. that follow some of those publications. And none of this accounts, of course, for the chatter and debate about what we think we know within the hundreds of millions of Facebook and Twitter posts and uploads, and about 400 billion emails.

How do I know any of this? I spent a few minutes looking it up. It will slip out of my head as easily as it entered. We live in a fog of information, a fog that’s everywhere but intangible, claustrophobic but endless, navigable only for a few steps at a time and blind to much of the long dark road ahead.

A Song We Were Meant to Sing

Here’s a thought that wandering in the fog might evoke: Knowledge is a scaffolding built to carry the weight of something much larger than itself: our ignorance. The mass of what we don’t (or can’t) know is both vast and often invisible. And, I would argue, it is just as beautiful as all that we have learned.

Most of the universe is a complete mystery, though we have empty files labeled “dark energy” and “dark matter.” Here on Earth, we can’t map the ephemeral existence of clouds, the endless fungal filaments in forest soils, or the complex interplay of microbes in our own bodies. We don’t know how many species there are or what it feels like to be a rat, flounder, warbler, or hedgehog. We don’t understand our own consciousness, much less that of a phoebe on a fencepost.

This sense of the unknown and unknowable might be a spiritual feeling for you. For me, it’s both physical and metaphysical. We’re clever apes, not gods, but the unknowability of so much of reality feels like a song we were meant to sing.

It’s helpful, I think, to imagine knowledge as a sphere growing in size. It becomes larger and deeper by the day, but its expanding surface area continually comes into contact with an ever-widening amount of unknowns, like a light-fed planet hanging in the darkness of space. Every answer begs more questions.

What ignores us saves us, as I’ve written before. We need to be as cognizant of the mystery of existence as we are confident in our clever inquiries. The astonishing amount of information and knowledge we have accumulated about the real world - from gravity to nematodes to our bodies’ interstitium to Amazonian ecology - is a cause for celebration but not for hubris. We suffer a diversity of blindnesses. What we don’t know still exists at the scale of the universe, and is echoed all the way down to the scale of a quark.

The relationship between knowledge and ecology is primarily ethical: We either widen the circle of our empathy to include other life in all its mystery and vitality, or we stumble through the consequences like children lost in a fog.

The Path Into Mystery

We must embrace life - even those marvelous fog-riding bacteria and their proton-driven flagellar motors - or else we commit ourselves to the loneliness of aliens without a home planet. Knowledge should always, always move us closer to the mystery, rather than helping us pretend we have somehow surpassed it.

Our flood of knowing is not itself a wisdom that teaches us how to live. We might all define that kind of wisdom differently, but it’s not the wisdom we need if it doesn’t include a love for all the life that we know surrounds us, a loving defense of what remains amid our destruction, and a loving acceptance of our existential need to become less destructive. We need guardrails on the long dark road ahead. We need a set of ethics for both scientific inquiry and culture more broadly to ensure, eventually, that all human activity is beneficial to life.

To do otherwise is to advocate for shipwreck on a clear and starlit night.

Recently, in Nature Briefs, Rhett Ayers Butler wrote a thoughtful remembrance of the important botanist and conservationist Peter Raven, who in the 20th century helped evolve our view of the living world from a mere collection of species to an ecological community of connected lives, a community increasingly under threat by human expansion. Raven, Butler says, was adept at conveying this larger picture to both scientific and lay audiences, and his life’s work was characterized by reflections on that larger picture:

What emerges from these reflections is a consistent theme: the idea that knowledge carries obligations. To understand the interconnectedness of life is, in his view, to recognize the consequences of disrupting it. Yet he resisted fatalism. Even as he documented accelerating rates of extinction, he maintained that there was still time to act, and that action would be most effective if it combined scientific insight with social and economic change.

Knowledge carries obligations. Effective action is rooted in both science and ethics. That feels like wisdom.

As does Robin Wall Kimmerer’s query to her Earth-loving students, in Braiding Sweetgrass, about whether they believe that the Earth loves us back. For those who see the planet as a pile of resources, as well as for those of us rattling the Anthropocene cage because we feel both trapped and complicit, that seems deeply unlikely. But existence is not a set of quid pro quo transactions, Kimmerer reminds us. It is a gift economy.

This came to mind when I read about the fog-as-life study in a Nautilus article, because it’s not just that bacteria are living and reproducing in their dreamy floating aquatic microhabitat. It’s that much of the microbial population is a host of methylobacteria breaking down industrial pollutants like formaldehyde. They are a “hub of active detoxification,” a gift in response to the changes we keep making to the ancient order of things.

It is a gift that evolved to expect gifts in return.

If they’re detoxifying “our” air, the least we can do when we step out into the mist is to pay attention to all that we cannot see. We can begin by recognizing, as we breathe in the fog, that everything we know is a path into mystery, not out of it. In doing so, perhaps we begin to humble ourselves before the much greater sea of life, all that embodies and cares for us.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

From and Trespassing (formerly On the Commons), “Private property: bedrock . . . or shale?”, another of her brilliant and fierce essays interrogating the false promise of private ownership, and how for centuries now it has continually corroded the common good, both human and more-than-human. Privatization of the natural world and of our physical and digital lives is not about security and independence but about power and profit. We think we own what we own, but in reality

…if someone more powerful comes along who wants to dominate that land in a different way, the bedrock contained in the idea of private property allows them to do so.

The same is true of water, electricity, seeds, air, trees, rare earth minerals; knowledge, imagination, your mind, your relationships. The law as it currently stands does not protect life. It doesn’t even truly protect rights. It protects property. And the transformation of property into power compounds over time.

From Yale e360, India is rapidly becoming the first major nation to power its industrialization phase with solar. Burning coal - like all wealthy nations have done - has been their plan, but solar is by far the cheapest source of power around the world now. By 2029, 280 square miles of a salt desert will be covered by 6o million panels, enough to power Austria.

From Northern Woodlands, a short sweet essay about a backyard red maple, a girl who preferred climbing trees with Thoreau in her pocket, and the beauty of samaras in flight:

Once upon a time, my backyard maple tree was a seed hitched to a samara that flew. If butterflies can remember a scent or a taste from their caterpillar days – the green, leaf-munching time before their entire body dissolved and reconstituted itself – is it a great stretch to imagine a tree holding somewhere in its body the memory of flight?

From ASU News, “Asphalt is everywhere, but it is bad for our health?”, research reveals that the volume and toxicity of VOC emissions from asphalt are, yes, terrible for human and environmental health, and that our hotter world is making emissions worse. The good news is that new asphalt formulations that reduce that toxicity are possible, including the use of algae to bind those VOCs.

From and The Rewilder Weekly (and thanks to for bringing it to my attention), that article I linked to above about “daylighting” long-buried streams. Eckhart explains the history, the increasingly popular solution, and its benefits:

And once you’ve daylighted such waterways, in essence restored them to their rightful and meaningful place, they’ll be the gift that keeps on giving. People will begin to mingle, to enjoy, to be mindful, to take care. Local governments will support with tree planting and biodiversity riverbanks. Rivers will also deliver on their cooling effect - benefits all around for everyone.

From High Country News, a wonderful ode to flies, and what they can teach us. While practicing meditation in her Colorado yard, the writer often finds that wildlife - like deer, mice, and birds - would lose their fear and treat her like part of the landscape. Flies would land on her in numbers, but rather than becoming annoyed, she taught herself to accept the life that had accepted her:

To the flies, I was simply another patch of earth. The land doesn’t flinch and complain when a fly lands on it. I surrendered and felt myself dissolving into the land itself. A sense of effortless belonging arose when I quit pushing away the natural world — the beautiful and the ugly; pleasant and unpleasant; the flies, flowers, sun and breeze. I was learning patience: Raging against flies would accomplish nothing but disturbance within my own mind.

From David Roberts and the Volts podcast, “Sooner than you think, electricity is going to be cheap, abundant, and boring,” an upbeat conversation about how utility-led expansion of batteries across the grid will (might?) solve the grid’s problems.

As always, from and The Weekly Anthropocene, an excellent collection of good-news energy and conservation stories. This week includes superpods of humpback whales, the astonishing surge in grid-scale batteries, endangered langurs thriving in Singapore, and an artist down the road from me here creating exquisite seabird decoys to be used in conservation projects.

From the Revelator, “Dangerous Drinking: Is Bottled Water Really Safer than Tap Water?”, a review of the plastic problems, false advertising, and toxicity of our bottle water addiction.

Share

Hello everyone:

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

We Lose the World Too

To be alive now in Anthropocene culture can feel like being lost in a hall of mirrors. We’ve been indoors for a century, online for a few decades, and now submerged within screens that reflect back endless iterations of the indoor and online world. Only humans matter, the mirrors say, but we don’t know why. Some mirrors we build on our own, but most are being built for us by those who profit from our self-absorption and subsequent neglect of other life.

Nearly everywhere we go, we see only ourselves and each other in an endless network of fragmented reflections. Nature, reduced to background, is now peripheral. As we move deeper and deeper online, the fragmentation of culture pulls us in and fractures our attention, leaving only an unsure sense of being human in a broken human world. The real world outside the hall, meanwhile, has been diminishing in direct correlation to our failure to see ourselves within it.

Years ago, while working in Antarctica and watching how much of our time - socializing, watching movies, turning inward - was spent oblivious to the astonishing otherworld of ice we inhabited, I scribbled into my notebooks this line: Mirrors were the first TV.

I meant, I think, to pin down how we could get so lost in ourselves that we lose the world too.

We are an obsessively social species whose consciousness (personal, societal, cultural) is constructed from stories about ourselves in the context of other people. So it matters, in absolute terms, what stories we tell. It matters what stories we are told, who they include and why they matter, and it matters which stories we believe and act upon.

There are plenty of other species whose altricial young need to be taught how to live, but we are the only animal born as a blank slate that can be weaponized against life itself.

Anything You Polish With Attention

Modern humans spent most of our first few hundred thousand years without any way to see ourselves except by glancing into still waters. The history of mirrors dates back only a few thousand years, and for nearly all of that time mirrors were rare treasures in wealthy hands. I’ve often wondered about the consequences of the radical psychological and social shift from those nature-based glimpses of ourselves to cultures full of mirrored reflections, of images in art and photographs, and now a flood of constant self-seeing.

I’ve read that there was among the ancient Greeks a superstition that seeing one’s reflection in the water - perhaps a glimpse of the soul - was unlucky or even fatal. The story of Narcissus falling fatally in love with his own image might be an expression of that fear, but here and now it’s tempting to see the myth as a metaphor for a culture that collapses into the empty spaces between mirrors, photographs, and screens.

We’ve forgotten what it means to live an almost entirely image-less life, in the real world, as our ancestors did for thousands of millennia. How many of us can imagine it? And what would it mean to only see our reflection outside, framed by the living world?

My query here, then, is not about the narcissism of a selfie-taking society, but about the likely ecological benefits of seeing our faces most often in nature rather than in a frame on a wall in the built world. What if the ethical framework for our inward lives was rooted instead in looking outward?

The wise Maria Popova likes to say that “Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror,” revealing something about our deeper selves. Likewise, I used to tell my students that “what we practice is what we become.” So much of what our culture polishes now, though, reflects badly on us. I don’t mean this in the personal sense, since most of the blame lies with those remaking the world in remarkably stupid and harmful ways, and ensuring that we are trapped within it.

I mean the Earth-breaking systems we’ve built and polished for energy, agriculture, transportation, and materials. I mean, among many other mistakes, the bright shiny chemistry of industrial contamination, the nacreous glistening of oil on water, and the thousands of glinting satellites now turning the planet’s orbital space into the next planetary emergency.

Mirroring a Particular Human Weakness

I’ve written, in “The Sky is Falling” and “Shoot the Moon,” about the dangers of the rapidly growing Starlink arrays and the lunacy of trying to colonize the Moon, but I have to add another weird shiny toy to the stratospheric mix: Reflect Orbital’s plan to launch tens or hundreds of thousands of satellite mirrors to provide “sunlight on demand” at night across much of the Earth.

Mirrors in orbit that provide nighttime sunlight at a price: It’s yet another concept/product in a global culture that seems to have no ecological principles, that cannot imagine either hard limits to growth or the consequences that come after, and that finds no meaning in the fabric of life except in its usefulness to us. You can call this capitalism, but capitalism only mirrors a particular human weakness: the tendency to believe - if we haven’t been raised to respect other life - that we are what gives the planet its meaning.

I wouldn’t take this project seriously except for a) its pending FCC approval and b) the consequences. The minds behind Reflect Orbital believe there is a market - 24-hr solar energy production, industrial sites, disaster response, agricultural production, military operations, urban safety, and entertainment events - for nighttime sunlight on demand. They claim that their 54 m/177 ft-wide mirrors will provide delivery of pinpointed light (5 km diameter or larger) that’s dimmable (from “noon light to moon light”), uniform in intensity, and easy to turn off and on. They’re planning to launch their first satellite (18 m wide) this year, and claiming that they’ll install a megaconstellation of more than 50,000 by 2035. The founder has suggested the number might someday increase to 250,000 satellites.

Why Banish the Night?

The least interesting but perhaps most relevant initial question is whether there is a way to profit from this (other than taking tens of millions of dollars up front from investors), given the massive costs of building, launching, and maintaining a vast fleet of satellites. Perhaps there are enough governments, militaries, cities, and festival organizers to sustain a small network of space-based mirrors, but the marginal increase in solar energy production or in crop growth seems unlikely to extract payment from anyone harvesting photons or corn, especially when batteries and dirt are both dirt cheap.

Boosting solar energy is apparently the main thrust of the business plan. But as a pair of astronomers explain, so little solar energy would be reflected by each satellite mirror that Reflect Orbital would need 3,000 satellites focused on a single large solar farm to reach their brightness goal of 20% of the Sun at midday. 250,000 of them, which is 16 times more than all existing satellites combined, could only supplementabout 80 large solar arrays. Solar is already the cheapest energy source we’ve got, and will only get cheaper. Boosting it a tiny bit with billion-dollar orbital investments is not a business plan.

Profit aside, can the plan work? Not on cloudy nights, certainly. Not if the constant rain of micrometeorites hitting Earth play havoc with these thousands of large fragile mylar mirrors. And not if these satellites fail to aim with extraordinary precision, as promised, night after night, for years at a time.

And even if it could work, should we allow it? Why banish the night when so little is gained? Who gets to choose? As astronomer Samantha Lawler noted in a Smithsonian article: “It’s wild that one little company in California, [with] permission from one agency that looks after radio transmissions, can change the sky for everyone in the world.”

How Unnecessary It Is

The list of problems for people and society is long. For astronomers, of course, it’s catastrophic “light pollution by design.” Lawler says that “the sky will be too bright to conduct the vast majority of astronomy research.” A Big Think article explains that the test satellite going up this year will seem a bit brighter than the full Moon, but concentrated into a light beam that can “fry a human retina” and ruin the optics of telescope lenses. A technical report equated the light source with a laser, with all of the associated risks.

Stargazing for ordinary people, already difficult because of Earth-bound light pollution, will be impossible for far more of us if thousands of Moon-bright mirrors hang like spotlights in the sky. This will be true even in remote and wild places, as city-sized beams of light sweep across large areas that do not want them.

Worse, each bright source and light beam would disturb a far greater area that the intended illumination zone. (Think of it as a bright lamp in the next room keeping you awake.) Millions of people who don’t want their nights to disappear under the constant glare of false sunlight could be forced to do so anyway. And the health risks are substantial, as the Big Think article noted:

…the exposure to bright artificial flashes of light, even for milliseconds, can not only disrupt human circadian rhythms, leading to less and lower-quality sleep, but has also been linked to certain types of cancers in humans.

And it’s worth noting the consequences for all the other human infrastructure in low-Earth orbit, the satellites we rely on for necessary things like communication and navigation. The rush to launch thousands or tens of thousands of new satellites, especially at the high altitude Reflect Orbital is aiming for, increases the likelihood of a Kessler Syndrome cascade of satellite collisions that render a broad swathe of orbital space unusable. And these megaconstellations are intensifying the new Starlink-related chemistry problem of filling the stratosphere with tons of metal particles from satellite burnout.

In short, then, in the service-to-humanity analysis, this Reflect Orbital plan seems likely to become an abject failure. Too many risks, too many harms, no substantial benefits, and pie-in-the-sky economics: It’s exactly the kind of thing that shouldn’t get past the drawing board. As the Big Think article concluded,

The most unfortunate part of the Reflect Orbital proposal is how unnecessary it is. We already have solutions to all of the problems that it purports to solve, with none of the many significant consequences…

With any luck, they’ll launch their test satellite this year and all of these irrational chickens will come home to roost, and the concept will fade alongside its declining investments. Success seems impossible, because as the Conversation article put it, why the hell would we want “250,000 enormous mirrors constantly circling Earth to keep some solar farms ticking over for a few extra hours a day?”

The Shared Wilderness

Finally, I’ll point out that the entire sophisticated Reflect Orbital website is devoid of information or concern about how life on Earth actually works. As planned, giant space mirrors lighting the night would be a planetary-scale ecological nightmare, but the company vaguely promises a “healthier planet” (after human progress and economic growth) and the protection of “sensitive environments” (despite the harms of nocturnal disruptions to every environment). And they offer an ode to how the Sun powers all of life while seemingly oblivious to their planned disruption of that life, which has evolved over billions of years with the natural day/night cycle.

I shouldn’t be astonished - in a world of PFAS rain, corn for ethanol, and fossil fuel corruption - but still I am astonished at the refusal to understand or care about the harm they plan on inflicting. It’s well known how urban and industrial light pollution impact plant health and animal behavior; now imagine broadening those impacts to landscape scale. Half of what life does happens at night, whether it’s pollination or plant growth, migration or navigation, hunting or foraging, resting or sleeping. This profit-driven plan ignores all of that.

Reflect Orbital is yet another example of how alien our culture has become, threatening like off-world colonizers to disrupt much of life on Earth with 24-hr light just so we can slightly increase our electrical production capacity. No place would be safe from this space-based profit-driven light, not even the most pristine locations, in the same way that no place is safe now from a hotter atmosphere. Like climate change, agricultural pesticides and herbicides, overfishing, PFAS chemistry, Starlink’s constellations, and so on, Reflect Orbital’s plan is yet another untested planetary experiment by an alien society.

Mirrors were the first TV, I wrote. Now we’re trying to fit the entire planet into the mirror we can’t stop looking into, into the fragmented reality we’ve created out of our online lives, and into the story we’re being told about how the planet belongs to us.

For an excellent brief summary of the problems with the Reflect Orbital proposal, read DarkSky International’s letter of opposition to its FCC application.

An astronomer quoted by the CBC described the mirrors as a threat to the “shared wilderness” of the night sky, and I love that idea as a seed of the kind of ecological civilization we should be building. And many of us are planting those seeds. We’re outside, away from mirrors and screens, working toward the protection and repair of the shared wilderness both at our feet and far above us. Or we’re inside, telling better stories.

And that, in a too-mirrored world, is a better reflection to end on.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

From and Between Two Seas, “we are not invisible,” a beautiful reminder that not only are we part of the natural world but also a stone whose weight and movements send ripples constantly through the community of life. This is both a gift and an obligation to pay attention.

From and Chasing Nature, “A Songbird for a Damaged World,” Bryan’s beautiful ode to Palm Warblers.

From Yale e360, “Restoring the Flow,” a major step in the effort to restore part of the Everglades in Florida, as years of work finally led to the reflooding of some 55,000 acres of wetland once sliced and dried for a failed housing development.

From the Times, “The Hole in the Ice at the End of the Earth,” a moving and beautifully illustrated story about a South Korean scientific team working under difficult Antarctic conditions and an extremely tight timeline to become the first to drill through the Thwaites Glacier and place sensors to better understand the collapse of the “doomsday glacier” that may someday lead to 15 feet of global sea level rise.

Also from the Times, Lithuania is hard at work restoring peat bogs on the border with Russia, partly to improve habitat, partly to increase carbon storage, and partly to create an impassable boggy barrier to Russian tanks.

From Nature Briefs, a thorough summary of how philanthropic funds for ocean research are spent, and how those funds are weirdly lacking, despite the oceans containing much of life on Earth.

From Anthropocene, AI applications are proving to be extremely useful in processing thousands of camera-trap images of wildlife, allowing researchers to more quickly assess the key conservation questions those photos are meant to help.

Also from Anthropocene, a study finds, unsurprisingly, that investing in renewables is much, much better for both climate and human health than investing in direct air capture carbon removal.

Share

Hello everyone:

Some good literary news: My essay “We Are Not Alone” is a finalist for the Maine Literary Awards, hosted by the great Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

The van was full of joy, the noisy joy that only a pack of 14-year-olds can make when they have been to the mountains and the mountains have embraced them. I turned off the pavement we’d followed back from the White Mtns of New Hampshire for the last hour and a half, and onto the dirt road that led back to the summer camp near the border with Maine. We were minutes away.

There was singing, though I don’t recall the songs. This was more than thirty years ago, and who knows what happens to stories as they, and we, age. There had been singing in the mountains, too. Or chanting, really, as for three days up and over peaks and over root- and rock-filled trails we had taken turns in pairs carrying a large, heavy, awkward wooden box (as well as our backpacks), and occasionally broke out into a loud and cheerful three-beat theme: “Wan-i-gan! Wan-i-gan! Wan-i-gan!”

The wanigan box swung from a long wooden pole over our shoulders, like large prey being carried home by two hunters. Carrying it was an absurdity, a challenge the kids invented. They loved the confused or amused reactions we got from other hikers moving aside as we barreled through, and now they carried that joy homeward, scarcely contained by the van.

And then, a few miles from home, the invisible bulldozer of our windshield killed a robin flying across the road.

The thwack was loud, and so was I as I swore and hit the brakes, pulling the van to the side. Emotionally, I was in two places at once - the sadness and fury of a guilty conscience, and the churning internal narration of an adult gauging how I should be reacting in front of the kids - as I flung open the van door to find and move the robin.

I cannot see the bird now, though I imagine it splayed across the gravel. I do remember one of the girls joining me as I set the warm corpse in the dry, tall, late-summer grass.

Back in the van, I was dislocated. I wanted to acknowledge the moment’s grief while not raining on the kids’ parade. I think I offered a “Sorry, guys” before starting slowly up the road. They knew me well enough, and they felt the significance - this was terrible - and so they quieted down, but they deserved to keep their joy. The bird’s death was a loud discordant thwack amid the singing, but that singing was rooted in weeks of traveling together in the wild and years of sharing summer camp together.

The silence in the van asked questions of us: What did we owe the bird, and what did we owe our joy?

These were the final hours of their summer camp years. As 14-year-olds, this had been their capstone summer. No longer kids at camp, they’d arrived three weeks earlier as young adults only to pack and then leave on a 17-day canoe trip in northern Maine, with me as one of their leaders. We’d had a famously good time, counting moose, jumping off bridges, and making improvised sails with paddles and tarps while traveling 90-odd miles by river and lake.

And by land, through the difficult crux of the journey: two and a half trips across a two-mile portage between the Penobscot and Allagash watersheds, carrying canoes, gear, and wanigans filled with food and cooking gear. The term originates in an Ojibwe word, and now (among the canoeing culture of northern North America) means a purpose-built box for kitchen items in a canoe. Ours were simple plywood crates with two rope handles, and a pain in the ass to carry for two miles. Canoeing, I’ve always said, is a terrible way to hike.

Thus the absurdity of the idea to carry a wanigan up and over mountains on the three day hike that followed our 17 days on the river.

Like all the thrushes, robins are a beautiful marvel - I love their elegant run-and-freeze ambush hunting technique for worms and bugs - but they’re not rare or threatened. Unlike most other thrushes, they thrive in our fragmented, lawn-obsessed culture. And one robin’s death is a raindrop in a mortal flood: Hundreds of millions of birds are killed by traffic every year, and that’s only a fraction of avian mortality from cats, windows in buildings, habitat loss, and pesticide poisoning. Our robin was one unnecessary death among billions.

So what’s the value of a robin? How long do we grieve the bump in the road, the feather shadow on the glass? How much do we interrupt our day or our joy for the thump on the bumper or for the body in the ditch?

However we answer those questions, these deaths have weight. Part of that weight is our response to death itself, and part is the reminder of the incalculable burden of roadkill and other industrial killing for which we are all directly or indirectly responsible: the poisoned Big Ag farms our food comes from, the roads our goods and services travel to arrive at our stores or on our doorstep, and the glassy buildings we stare out of at the diminished real world. That’s the world we’ve built for our kids, and that’s the world they’re either normalizing or fighting against.

They also inherit these heavy, awkward boxes of harm, guilt, and apathy that we’ve been carrying from generation to generation, harms done to us and by us in an ecologically bankrupt system. What I struggled with in that moment outside the van is part of the Anthropocene struggle: Deciding where the greater reality is between a pop-up culture full of invisible bulldozers and the astonishing, eternal wonders of the life being bulldozed.

Is the road we’re traveling a way forward or a scar cut through the beauty?

I can make a good ethical case for a van full of kids in love with rivers, mountains, and life, and for me in that moment as a guide to all of it. Those kids - now somehow in their late 40s - have probably loved moose and mountains, rivers and trails, for their entire lives. Maybe summer camp connected them to birds too. And so perhaps the robin’s death can be considered collateral damage in the midst of an effort to reconnect the next generation to the fabric of life that embraces that robin. But that still feels like a justification for the status quo, for choosing the road over the bird.

In the quiet van at the side of the road, it would have been nice to have the wisdom to articulate and defuse the tension in that moment, to acknowledge the death we’d caused while allowing room for the joy to continue - a moment of silence, perhaps. But I muddled along, as did the kids, and we were home for dinner before the robin’s body had fully cooled.

That’s how our days go, right? We muddle forward awkwardly through a diminished natural world. To a certain degree, that’s okay. We’re a muddling species in a culture that makes us aliens on our own planet, and it seems to me that we rarely have the wisdom to articulate even to ourselves how to live amid what’s being lost, assuming we think about it at all.

And the reality is that every day of this life is full of these tradeoffs. As I’ve said here many times, we’re all complicit and trapped, always, because the system built for us has no exits. We can reduce our harm and devote ourselves to changing the system, but we’re all still inside it.

Looking back now, the 14-year-olds seem wiser than I was. Not in their conscious articulation, but in the joy, in the singing, and in the scale of the challenges they were willing to take on. I’m cheerful, but joy is a skill I have to relearn each time, and I limit my singing to the page. I was like that then, and haven’t changed. I wonder who the kids are now, but in that time of their lives, at least, they had learned that they could do anything, or at least to feel that they could.

Who else would choose to lug a heavy awkward wooden box swinging from a rough pole through three days of mountain hiking but a pack of kids who had been at home on the river and felt embraced by the mountains? They’d been camping and traveling for weeks, cheerfully, so why couldn’t they, as a cheerful team, be the first people in history (so we imagined) to portage a wanigan up into the peaks of the White Mountains?

All of which is a reminder that kids, then and today, are inheriting the positive stuff too, whether from a hippy summer camp and its expeditions, a long-haired poet/trip leader, or the books, songs, TikToks, and other carriers of age-old stories we tell of protecting the real world, of finding joy in birds and moose, of hoisting up our burdens and singing our way up the mountain. The robins sing, despite everything, and so do 14-year-olds. I like to think that some of the kids in that van are now some of the adults working to make a better world for all who sing.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

From PBS, the Wilding documentary about the stunning rewilding project by Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree at the Knepp estate in southern England. Marginal farmland punished by industrial agriculture and soaked in pesticides has, once left alone and stocked with wild cattle, ponies, deer, pigs, and beaver, reverted quickly into a small portrait of pre-modern Europe and attracted an incredible wealth of biodiversity, including healthy populations of some of the UK’s most endangered species. Find out more at the Knepp estate site, read Rewilding Britain’s larger context for the project, and spend some time at the “Kneppflix” YouTube page, which has lots of rewilding clips and a short film, Knepp Rewilded, about the rewilding project, in which Isabella describes part of the project’s magic:

I think the key to Knepp’s success is really feeling that something exciting is happening here, that nature is teaching us something, rather than us always feeling that we are in control, that we are the masters of the universe.

I recommend you subscribe to Owl in America, which in the spirit of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American is subtitled “Notes from An American Environmentalist.” Owl in America isn’t on Substack, but like so much good work here is free for all but well worth your paid subscription. The latest letter, covering the Rice's whale endangered status, approval for new deepwater oil drilling, a new public lands rule, and the Park Service in disarray, is here. Here’s her general pitch:

Owl in America is a series of letters written from inside the unraveling of U.S. environmental governance. Drawing on the author's decades of work in public service—as a biologist, an environmental lawyer, and a witness to how laws, agencies, and courts function in practice—the series documents the second Trump era as it reshapes public lands, wildlife protections, climate policy, and the institutions meant to safeguard the commons. These essays track not only what is being dismantled, but how: through administrative capture, legal erosion, disinformation, privatization, and the steady hollowing of democratic constraints.

The series resists both despair and false reassurance. It journeys into analysis of political power, but always returns back to land, ecology, history, and moral responsibility. What does human stewardship means in an age of accelerating extraction and authoritarian drift? The through-line is paying attention: to systems, to language, to human experience, and to the fragile threads that still connect people, law, and the living world. These letters invite us to stay informed and connected while the ground shifts beneath our feet.

From the Guardian, in the spirit of swords-into-plowshares, how bomb craters can become biodiverse wetlands. The article begins with WWII craters outside London, now longstanding ecologically-rich ponds, and shifts to the thousands of craters now pockmarking Ukraine, speculating on what a peaceful future will look like in a ravaged land. The good news, as one Ukrainian ecologist noted, is that “Diversity of habitats, even created by war, leads to species diversity.”

From Noema, “There is ‘No Hard Problem of Consciousness’,” a complex but readable philosophical essay on how both mind and soul, however mysterious, are as subject to the laws of physics as our furniture. What makes us imagine our souls as some transcendent magic that exists outside the bounds of nature is the same old assumption that we and our consciousness are somehow more important than other animals and plants, mountains and rivers.

From the Times, “America the Undammed,” an upbeat look at the slow but steady movement to get rid of “deadbeat” dams that for far too long have turned rivers into ecologically impoverished messes. Check out also the great work being done to remove dams from the nonprofit American Rivers.

Also from the Times, “Why So Few Babies?”, an op-ed that reasonably concludes that the decline in birthrates across the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, is defined by a pervasive sense of social uncertainty and economic instability. After the “great recession” and amid the polycrisis of climate and biodiversity loss, and during a rise in right-wing populism that exacerbates both, the future becomes a less secure place to raise kids. The cause of birth rate decline is complicated, certainly, but this assessment seems like a solid part of the picture:

What unites these disparate cultures, policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.

The First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels was held on April 24th-29th in Santa Marta, Colombia, with representatives from 60 nations gathering to discuss what the COP conferences have not: How to move away, finally, from the root cause of 86% of anthropogenic climate change. You can read accounts at the Guardian and Carbon Brief; the latter is a fuller breakdown of what was accomplished, and the former is a ten-point summary. Both report on the relief of the attendees to finally be discussing a way forward. Here’s the Guardian:

“The mood here in Santa Marta is euphoric,” said Tzeporah Berman, the founder and chair of the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty initiative. “After years stuck in endless debates about whether to phase out fossil fuels, finally we are focusing on the how. We are no longer fighting for recognition of the problem, but creating solutions. It’s like watching a dam break – all that pent-up experience, knowledge and passion suddenly flowing into concrete ways to phase out dirty fuels. The hope is contagious.”

From NPR, an account of the Stillaguamish Tribe in Washington buying up river delta farmland in their people’s former territory and re-creating the ancient tidal marshes that once nurtured young salmon.

From and Planet Ficus, “Strangler Figs Are the Rainforest’s Pop-Up Restaurants,” another great tale of an underappreciated reality, that fig trees are absolutely vital for life around the tropical world. Be sure to listen to the wonderful recording of all the wildlife converging on a single strangler fig in Indonesia when the figs have ripened.

Share

Hello everyone:

Something different and important this week: I’m here to motivate you to do two things: 1) Read the full post, “Congress is About to Legalize the Liquidation of America’s National Forests,” by Jim Pattiz at , about how the Fix Our Forests Act, in the hands of the Trump administration, enables a large-scale sell-off of America’s national forests; and 2) contact your Democratic senators - too many of whom plan to vote in favor - to try and stop this bill from passing.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

The Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA) now awaits a vote in the Senate, after sailing through the U.S. House of Representatives with considerable Democratic support. The Senate looks likely to pass it too, unless we can convince Democratic senators to withdraw their support.

The problem here isn’t that FOFA has no merit, but that in the hands of the Trump administration it becomes a incredibly powerful tool to erase vast swathes of national forest without 1) environmental review, 2) Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections, or 3) legal challenge.

As Jim Pattiz described it in his article’s subtitle,

Through the Fix Our Forests Act, Senate Democrats are about to hand the Trump administration permanent statutory authority to log America’s national forests at landscape scale.

The Fix Our Forests Act was written with good intentions under the Biden administration to help the Forest Service address wildfire risks, but like so much of American governance under Trump, the regulatory flexibility provided by the bill will be weaponized to destroy that which it was designed to protect. We’ve seen all the good faith assumptions that underpin U.S. democracy thrown onto the fascist pyre. We should not make the same mistakes with the management of our national forests.

The bill, Pattiz says,

was drafted for a Forest Service that does not exist.

It was drafted in 2023 assuming career civil servants working in good faith. Line officers exercising discretion in the direction of ecological restoration. Expanded authorities tilting in practice toward prescribed fire, thinning small trees near communities, protecting watersheds. The bill’s authors imagined an agency that wanted to do the right thing and just needed Congress to help ease the way.

That Forest Service is gone. It’s been gone since January. It’s not coming back any time soon.

The agency running your national forests today is led by scoundrels who despise the very idea of public land.

Pattiz provides ample description of those scoundrels and their anti-public-land ideology and actions. I’ll let you read the post for those details, but it is yet another reminder of how many Trump appointees are categorically opposed to the agencies they’ve been hired to lead.

The Democrats sponsoring and supporting this bill are, says, Pattiz, “operating under political assumptions that were suspect in 2023 and are catastrophically wrong in 2026.” They drafted a bill for

a Forest Service that wanted to tilt toward ecology but was boxed in by paperwork. They imagined fireshed management areas the agency would use to prioritize prescribed fire and community protection. They imagined emergency authorities used sparingly, for actual emergencies. They imagined an ESA Section 7 fix that would streamline noise-level bureaucratic delays without compromising species protection.

Every single one of those imaginings has been overtaken by events.

It’s especially important that you read the What the Bill Does section of Pattiz’s post. It details the six provisions of the FOFA, and makes it clear how much is at stake as well-intentioned streamlining of regulations are transmogrified into a gutting of national forests. Again, read the whole post, but here’s the gist:

• Allows up to 10,000 acre “categorical exclusion” logging projects with no environmental review or public comment.

• Allows up to 250,000 acre “fire-shed management areas” with accelerated logging that is exempt from environmental review.

• Establishes an “emergency authority” to initiate logging before environmental review is complete. (The USDA Secretary immediately declared a false wildfire “emergency” on 112 million acres (59%) of national forest. That administrative maneuver would become permanent statute.)

• Prevents new Endangered Species Act listings, or new data on previous listed species, from having any impact on Forest Service logging plans.

• Nearly eliminates judicial review of Forest Service logging plans.

• Eliminates the requirement to update forest management plans, essentially locking in the free-for-all that FOFA establishes.

Our job is to contact our Senators, particularly the Democrats who might be swayed by a clear description of the problem. Call or write. You know the drill.

Pattiz offers a sample letter to email to your Democratic Senators. Again, this should be done as soon as possible. Here’s my slightly modified, slightly longer version of his letter:

Sample Email

Subject: Vote No on the Fix Our Forests Act (S. 1462)

Dear Senator [Name],

I’m writing to urge you to vote NO on the Fix Our Forests Act (S. 1462) and to oppose any unanimous consent motion to bring it to the floor.

This bill was drafted in 2023 to provide a flexible forest management strategy regarding wildfire risk to a Forest Service which would apply it with thoughtful restraint and scientific rigor. But that Forest Service no longer exists.

Today the agency is run by a logging executive, supervised by a billionaire whom the Forest Service once tried to get a restraining order against, and overseen by a Secretary who has already falsely declared an “emergency” across 112 million acres — 59 percent of the entire National Forest System — to bypass environmental review.

FOFA hands this administration permanent statutory authority to do what it is already doing administratively: log America’s national forests at landscape scale, with no public input, no environmental review, no Endangered Species Act constraints, and no meaningful judicial remedy.

A bill written under the assumption of good-faith implementation cannot survive contact with this administration. The Forest Service, like other agencies in the Trump era, is now run by people intending to destroy that which they are sworn to protect.

Please vote NO on the Fix Our Forests Act (S. 1462).

Sincerely,

[Your name]

We need legislation and action that addresses the risk of catastrophic wildfires, but it needs to reflect political reality. That’s not this bill.

Please read the entire post. With that in mind, I’ll give Pattiz the final word:

You don’t give this administration discretion. You don’t give it expanded authorities. You don’t give it relief from judicial review, exemption from NEPA, or statutory protection from endangered species law.

Kill this bill.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

From Yale e360, “Older and Wiser: How Elder Animals Help Species to Survive,” a fascinating discussion of “longevity conservation,” an idea we should all become familiar with. Conservation of higher numbers of a threatened population isn’t enough, researchers have realized; we need also to protect the full age structure of that population, in particular those older animals whose memory and skills serve as bulwarks against both natural and human-made crises:

Scientists say older animals often play several critical roles in how populations function, broadly falling into three categories: ecological knowledge, reproduction, and immunity. They carry knowledge that guides survival, play outsized roles in producing the next generation, and possess stronger defenses against disease built up over time. Together, these qualities can make the difference between populations that endure and those that slowly fall apart.

From Aeon, “Have you forgotten what it means to be afraid of nature?”, an essay on Aldo Leopold and his idea that fear is a necessary part of a meaningful relationship with, and obligation to, the community of life. To make the Earth more whole, we must be part of the community rather than imagining ourselves as its superior:

Leopold does not ask us to erase ourselves from the land, nor to self-sacrificingly suppress our needs and concerns for some abstract whole. He is more demanding. Can we enlarge our sense of responsibility, stretch our moral imagination across species and timescales, and learn to live with the discomforts that genuine membership entails? Can we learn to coexist with the fear that arises from our relationships with the natural world? The reality is that not everyone is ready. Perhaps that hesitation marks the point where a commitment to land – to thinking like a mountain – demands more than we are willing to give.

From Grist, “Why millions of adorable bees are emerging from this cemetery,” a good-news story of cemeteries acting as biodiversity reservoirs in urban spaces.

From Orion, an ode to bobolinks, those most marvelous of grassland birds. Fascinating too: They have one of the longest migrations of songbirds - 12,500 miles - and, during nesting season, are both polygamous and polyandrous.

From my wife Heather Hardy and A Nest of Songs, “Cozy Cave,” an ode to that most strange and marvelous of spring ephemerals, skunk cabbage, a plant that generates its own heat to melt through late winter snow and attract pollinating insects in to get warm.

From Wired, “One Way or Another, Most of Our Energy Comes from Solar Power,” a lighthearted but thorough explanation of how the Sun drives nearly all the processes by which humans create energy. Fossil fuels, for example, are essentially “batteries” of potential energy derived from Sun-fed living matter and stored as oil, gas, or coal. The article does a nice job also of explaining how these sources are converted to energy. In the end, of course, the most logical and efficient means of generating energy is directly from the Sun, rather than through byzantine energy systems that also threaten all of life.

From the Reveal podcast at Mother Jones, a deep dive into the increase of spraying California’s forests with ever-increasing amounts of Roundup (glyphosate) by timber companies and the U.S. Forest Service:

“The wedding of the chemical industry and the Forest Service has got to be seriously and deeply looked at,” Craig Thomas, a fire restoration expert, says about the spraying. The Forest Service is “addicted to herbicide use and glyphosate, and we need to get them into rehab.”

From MIT Technology Review, a long and detailed attempt to understand the crazy scale of current and future energy use by AI and the data centers that host them, despite the lack of transparency from the companies that built them. It’s not pretty, and it’s about to get much uglier. However intense the usage is right now, it’s the least it will ever be.

From the Guardian, another reminder that burning wood for energy is worse for climate than burning gas. Bioenergy is a mistake of planetary proportions, whether ethanol for fuel or wood biomass for electricity. I like heat from a woodstove, but this simply cannot work at scale. We should never again look at forests as a fuel source for society.

Also from the Guardian, a remarkable technological achievement from a Nobel laureate harvests water from even dry air. These devices work off- and on-grid, and may prove to be lifesavers after natural disasters and may provide large-scale alternatives to desalination. Here are the details from the company behind the tech.

Share

Hello everyone:

I’m taking my own advice this week, having written in “Earth Through the Window” that the earth at our feet has more to tell us about life than the Earth viewed from space.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

The Enterprise and Adventure of the Day

There is an art to walking on trails in the Maine woods. We must, while moving steadily along, be able to look down, ahead, and around all at the same time. We look around to inhabit the forest we’re passing through; we look ahead to gauge our progress; and we look down, again and again, to avoid falling on our face.

The trail demands our attention because the trail is not merely a line drawn through the good green forest. It is a beaten path, sunken slightly into the hidden world below our feet. And it is a revelator, exposing the intricate lacing of tree roots and stones that bind the forest and snag the boot. A root-laced trail is always a walking meditation; we might be wandering, but our mind cannot.

I have wondered whether, if given a suitable quantity of millennia to evolve ourselves perfectly to the task, our eyes might shift one over the other, wide-spaced, like a prey animal concerned with up and down rather than left and right…

Henry David Thoreau, the patron saint of New England walkers, was so talkative upon the art of sauntering that he gives the impression in “Walking” and his journals of having written essays while on the hoof. But he’d never have survived putting pencil to notebook page if he’d composed while walking these trails. His bits of wisdom are clearly notes scribbled at the cabin table after a long day of footloose contemplation:

An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

I think I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and fields absolutely free from all worldly engagements.

The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours… but it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.

Roots Rock Reggae

I walked a fair amount in my first few decades: all through Maine and New Hampshire, the northern half of the Appalachian Trail, the South Island of New Zealand, a month in Nepal, and more. I spent years cultivating the joy of walking long distances with no agenda other than another day or week or even month of stepping out into the real world. Heather and I are out on the local trails here, but I miss the unscheduled days and their long trail unspooling out ahead.

Roots and stones were a natural feature elsewhere, certainly, but not like here in the thin soils of northern New England, where they often define the experience. Boots stumble, slip, slide, and wobble over the ankle-height topography, and our legs adjust as we go. When my friend Izak and I were hiking south together on the Appalachian Trail through Maine, our torsos and 50-lb backpacks waltzing in response to our jolted boots, he called the dance Roots Rock Reggae (after the Bob Marley song). It was a good name for the enterprise and adventure of those lovely days.

One of the ironies of spending so much time on a trail is how it fosters the desire to spend more time off the trail. To wander up a stream and kneel to moss, to photograph the light through the leaves, to see what’s happening on either side of the root-crossed corridor. To saunter at will like Thoreau amid the forest rather than on a marked line that cuts through it. To slow, and to stop; to study the world that these walks have taught you to love.

But another irony is that sticking to the trail is a gift to its natural surroundings. So much of the world is fragmented and diminished by our hands that in these rare places where our primary intervention is our footpath through them we are obliged to treat what remains with an excess of respect. Sticking to the trail minimizes our impact. The beaten path is a revelator of many things: the path forward, yes, but also the tension between the woven Earth and the trampled Earth.

To walk in the woods now is to dance quietly in that tension.

A Few Veins of Truth

We live now in the awareness of Suzanne Simard’s “wood-wide web,” the knowledge that these big trees swaying in the wind are less individuals in a population than voices in a diverse and inseparable chorus. Forests are expressions of their tangled roots, and those roots comprise a fabric that feeds, supports, and communicates with itself in astonishing and myriad unseen ways.

The living soil is among the most ancient and evolved of this planet’s worlds, but it remains abstract to us and, too often, beneath our notice. It’s good that, if the image of fungal mycelia weaving the hidden world together doesn’t easily come to mind, these visible roots offer a large-print version we can all comprehend at a glance.

Another irony, with a metaphor: These roots under our feet both reveal the web and expose our harms to it. I’m thinking not only of how we compress the trail’s soil but also - in the big picture - of the cost of how we go about acquiring so much of our knowledge. A culture informed by the extraordinary lessons of science but behaving like a bulldozer in a swamp is not acquiring wisdom from its data. From sea to sky and across the land we’ve worn down the most vital communities of life - e.g. the soil which births all terrestrial life - in order to reveal a few of the most obvious veins of truth.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer reminded us in Braiding Sweetgrass, we are a species that claims superiority over life but in fact knows far less about how to live than the plants who build the forests that sustain us:

In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.

Our modern quest for knowledge reveals this again and again. On so many of our paths to knowledge, we learn and then either weaponize our learning against the natural world or ignore its consequences on our fellow species. We feed ourselves by poisoning the land; we warm ourselves by overheating the planet; and we drink ourselves under the table. Pure science is visionary; applied science is reckless.

Our industrial culture values empathy for information over empathy for other lives. Look no further than the current gold rush for AI-supporting data centers powered by diesel or natural gas; every aspect of it is scarcely sane. None of it is needed, and none of it benefits life. Very little of it even benefits us.

Back on the trail, the interdependent forest floor laced with roots teaches us that a path without empathy is a dead end. All of life is interdependent; and all of life, except us, lives accordingly. From the perspective of other species, we might be mere fools wobbling our way down a root-covered path, if we hadn’t somehow ended up claiming the planet as our own.

The Path Ahead

You now have a pretty good idea of what my mind is thinking about while out dancing across the roots… It’s a skill, if a strange one, and one which Thoreau claimed to disdain. While walking, he insisted in his essay “Walking,” we must inhabit the forest we’re passing through:

What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

But Thoreau would agree that, for all of our strangeness as a species, we can know two things about ourselves with certainty: We evolved to think, and we were born to walk. Those two actions are as woven together as mycelia and root tips. I’m advocating here for us to think as much about the woods as we do about our paths.

Despite all of our questing, and all of our harms, life’s mysteries remain and the beaten path is still beautiful. Our maladaptions are being countered, fitfully, by all the good work being done to protect and rewild the Earth. That good work tells us, again and again, that what we’ve scarred can recover if we let it.

We are, for the moment, stuck in a culture that stumbles as it fails to look both down at the Earth and up ahead, but most of us insist on standing back up each time to see what kind of path we’ve made and how it might be remade. There’s so much to do, and it will take generations, but it can be done.

And for all of my worrying about that path, I want to close by saying that while the Earth isn’t ours, it is ours too. We share the place with our fellow species, and as long as we learn to act with restraint and respect, it’s okay to make permanent changes to the land. We have signatures, like beavers make ponds and termites make mounds. Flowers remade the planet, so we’re in good company.

Like so much of what characterizes the Anthropocene, most of our signatures are a problem not in their inherent nature but because of their scale. Farms, roads, and fishing boats are all lovely if kept to a minimum, but nightmares in their current numbers. If in the next century we ease back peacefully to, say, two billion people - the number of humans just a century ago - while working to unclog the atmosphere and cool down the oceans, much of the Earth will have a decent chance to thrive alongside us.

For now, remember to take a walk that offers a blessing for the whole day. I hope most of your trails are smooth and welcoming, but reserve some time for stumbling over roots and rocks. Observe the veins in the earth, remember the metaphor of the beaten path, but mostly just let yourself be woven into the woods. Find your revelators where you can.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

From Cory Doctorow and Pluralistic, a funny, brilliant, and hopeful rant about how the Trump administration’s cruel, dumb war in Iran is accelerating the global shift to renewable energy. (Thanks to and Sustain What for bringing it to my attention.) Definitely worth your time if you like a little righteous political sarcasm mixed in with your environmental news:

The Strait of Epstein crisis is going to do more to accelerate permanent, unidirectional migration away from fossil fuels to cleantech than decades of environmental activism. Cleantech is so much better than fossil fuels – cheaper, more reliable, cleaner – that anyone who tries it becomes an instant convert. That's why the fossil fuel industry has been so insistent that no one get to try it!

Democracy and biodiversity celebrity in action! From Unitas Malacologica (the international society dedicated to the study of molluscs), a chance to vote for the Mollusc of the Year 2026. Be sure to look at this year’s profile pics, and at previous winners. Your candidates are:

• Cumia intertexta – The Mediterranean vampire snail that drinks fish blood

• Ephippodonta lunata – The clam that opened its shells and grew wings

• Lithoredo abatanica – The shipworm that decided wood wasn't enough,
  and learned to eat through stone

• ​Triplofusus giganteus - The Atlantic’s giant predator snail that swallows its prey whole

• ​Filicaulis seychellensis – The flower-powered slug with skin white as snow

From the Walrus, “Billions of Birds Have Vanished in a Generation,” a lyrical and eloquent excerpt from the gorgeous The Book of Birds written by the great Robert Macfarlane and illustrated by Jackie Morris. The article title is dark, I know, but most of the piece looks beyond the loss to the magic and beauty of the birds themselves. Read it for its celebration of Nest, Egg, and Song, and be charmed into a love of birds, a love strong enough to help protect them:

Nest is ingenuity, intricacy, improvisation. Nest is wren’s ball—pure cocoon. Nest is starling’s mess—all twigs and yarn, untidy as a teenager’s room. Nest is four glowing blue robin eggs tucked in a boot in the daytime dusk of a cobwebbed barn. Nest is bowerbird’s bling and dazzle, Nest is flamingo’s urn of sun-burned clay. Nest is a gyrfalcon eyrie used yearly since long before the Roman Empire faded away. Nest is three swallow chicks packed snug in a cup of mud above a farmhouse door.

From Owl in America: Notes from an American Environmentalist, good news about preventing the development of a large mine next to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, thanks to a public-private partnership to protect this national treasure. The post also serves as a reintroduction to the remarkable Owl in America series that was here on Substack before moving elsewhere. As the name suggests, it’s an ambitious and eloquent accounting - in the spirit of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from An American - of the state of nature and environmental policy in the U.S.. I highly recommend you subscribe.

From Vox, a new venture capital firm has arrived to focus exclusively on companies whose products or services will benefit biodiversity, from leather made from invasive species to tech that diminishes bird collisions with wind turbines to autonomous underwater vehicles that plant seagrass. I’m not a big believer in capitalism saving the Earth… but this seems like money well-spent.

Have you ever been surrounded by rhinos while hiking in Nepal’s Chitwan National Park? I have, and so was intrigued to see the Guardian’s report on how an increase in wildlife populations (including rhinos) around the park has led to increased conflict and, more hopefully, to increased effort to teach locals how to avoid and resolve those conflicts. If nothing else, click the link to see a rhino strolling down a busy city street.

From Carbon Brief, a new report estimates that just 1% of land in the UK will be needed for renewable energy development, and that there is plenty of land in the country to meet all of the nation’s climate and nature goals.

Four stories from NPR, two small and good and two big and bad:

For Earth Day, the origin of the word “tree-hugger” in deforestation protests in India, and how the term, like the trees, is being embraced.

A Chinese EV company’s strategy for reducing battery-charging time: An automated three-minute drive-through battery swap. This is one of many new technologies bringing the EV age into alignment with drivers’ expectation of quick and convenient “fueling” stops.

“The Crisis of Overfishing in Southeast Asia,” a photoessay and article on the terrible fate of fish and fishermen in a region that suffers the most from the world’s inability to feed itself from the sea in a way that will not erase the ocean’s bounty and treat its fishermen fairly. It’s a hard story, but a necessary one to read, not least because much of the catch is sold to the U.S.. The crisis is global, but the worst impacts are regional.

And the failure of the ambitious Great Green Wall project in sub-Saharan Africa is “a cautionary tale of poorly planned projects, lacking in local participation and entangled in a labyrinth of opaque financing:”

This multi-billion dollar project was launched by the African Union in 2007. The plan: to plant a “wall” of trees spanning the entire width of Africa — 4,350 miles long and 10 miles wide — to fight desertification in the Sahel, the arid region to the south of the Sahara desert.

The Wall’s vision was boundless, and its backers called it a “new world wonder.” It would re-green nearly 250 million acres of land across 11 countries from Senegal to Djibouti, and in doing so, would sequester 250 million tons of carbon, provide “green jobs” for 10 million people and alleviate poverty, food insecurity and conflict across the region.

Share

Hello everyone:

Another Earth Day is upon us - next Tuesday, April 22nd - and for me it also marks my fifth anniversary of writing the Field Guide. For five years (or 260 weeks) I’ve spent my (late) nights and many of my Thursdays researching and writing these essays on the transformed Earth: as it is, as it was, and as it might be. It’s a life of homework and a constant search for resilience and joy amid the complex story of who we are and what we’re doing. And it’s a privilege to have you here for it. Thank you, especially to my founding and paid subscribers. You make this work possible for me to write and for others to read.

I’m using this anniversary to end an experiment. In January, I began to paywall older posts in an attempt to motivate more free subscribers to pay for the writing. A few of you stepped up - Thank You - but the experiment didn’t make a difference in my quest to make the work sustainable. And, honestly, I’ve been uneasy about cutting off full access to the conversation we all need to be having about the fate of life on Earth. So the paywall will go away.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

Seeing Through a Window

I’ve long thought of windows as double-edged guides to consciousness. On one hand, they’re a miracle of art and technology that are both solid and transparent, a transfiguring of sand into a gateway for light and transcendence, and a outward-looking salve for our indoor lives. We should all be as enlightened as a window.

On the other hand, windows seduce us deeper and deeper into these indoor lives. They provide the illusion of contact with the world, but without dirt on our feet and rain on our face. Like mirrors and monitors, windows are screens in which we see the world through the blur of our own reflections.

All of this came to mind last week as images from the Artemis II mission to the Moon came flooding in. Beautiful and astonishing, these images transport us beyond the maps of our ordinary lives. They’re a reminder of the improbability of our existence and of life itself in the cold emptiness of space.

They are, also, the product of a civilization shaped around - and mediated by - windows: the camera lens, the computer screens (yours, mine, NASA’s), and the thick layers of fused silica glass that make the Orion capsule’s portholes. Perhaps the most amazing of windows, Orion’s portholes are built to absorb micrometeoroid impacts, withstand the extremes of temperature and radiation in space, and survive the violence of reentry back into Earth’s atmosphere. I am amazed, actually, every time I remember that there are windows on a spacecraft.

But again, every window is a double-edged guide to consciousness, and this seems especially true when we’re gazing back at Earth from our attempts to escape it.

The Overview Effect

Here amid the tumult of life, distance gives us perspective. We take a walk to solve a problem, or step away to settle some nerves. Having been away from home, we return to loved ones with renewed love. Astronauts, too, have been telling us for decades that passing beyond Earth’s gravitational field makes them yearn to protect all that it contains. Leaving the planet and looking back at it through the window transforms their view of life. They call it the “overview effect.”

Christina Koch, Artemis II Mission Specialist, described it as seeing “the Earth as it exists with the whole universe in the background:”

…when you’re on the dark side of the Earth, you actually see this very thin green line that shows you where the atmosphere is. What you realize is every single person that you know is sustained and inside of that green line and everything else outside of it is completely inhospitable. You don’t see borders, you don’t see religious lines, you don’t see political boundaries. All you see is Earth and you see that we are way more alike than we are different.

These spacefarers are moved to change their lives, as retired NASA astronaut Mike Foreman explained:

…if you’re not a conservationist before you go to space, you’re at least partly a conservationist when you come back. Because when you see how thin that atmosphere is, that protective layer that we have here, you think, wow, we really have to take care of this because it does look so fragile from space.

And Victor Glover, pilot of the Artemis II crew, emphasized that the effect is deeply personal: “Are you going to try to live your life a little differently? Are you going to really choose to be a member of this community of Earth?”

And we, in turn, having seen the Earth through their eyes - the windows to the soul - and through their cameras and spacecraft windows, have at least partially woken to the beauty and fragility of life. The famous Earthrise photo (see above) taken by Bill Anders of the Apollo 8 crew on Christmas Eve, 1968, was the first color photo taken of Earth in the blackness of space, and is widely credited with sparking the environmental movement in general and the first Earth Day in 1970 in particular.

That first Earth Day remains by far the single largest day of public activism in American history, with 20 million people taking to the streets. That was a tenth of the U.S. population at the time. (The second-largest day of protest was the recent No Kings rally, with 8 million - out of 342 million - participating.)

And then there’s the 1990 image, the Pale Blue Dot (see above), which for me is even more stirring than Earthrise. It’s the last photo taken by the Voyager 1 probe, which was 3.7 billion miles (6 billion km) from the Sun and speeding out toward the edge of the solar system. Earth was, as the great Carl Sagan wrote in his book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam:”

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives… on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

And yet, here we are, all these years later, motivated by these images captured through NASA’s windows but causing more harm to Earth’s precious and fragile atmosphere and biosphere than ever. We see the peril and the folly, but despite fitful efforts to reduce both we seem far more preoccupied with our other windows. This is not the fault of the overview effect, but I do think the phenomenon has a fault.

My sense is that viewing the Earth from space does wake within many of us an urge to protect it, but it also encourages for nearly all of us the larger, more powerful delusion that the Earth belongs to us. We’ve “conquered” the planet rather than merely making a mess of it. And we’re “in charge” because we no longer remember the difference between a warehouse and a community. Worse, seeing the planet through the window of our technological prowess - machines sent out into the solar system - reinforces the weird idea that Earth is best understood as a useful launchpad for our greater ambitions.

The overview effect promotes respect and care, but often at too high a cost. If the respect and care is not rooted in the true humility that comes from understanding that we belong to the Earth, that we’re merely a small, short-lived entry in the encyclopedia of life, then our embrace of planetary stewardship is really a dictum of benevolent dictatorship. It’s the bright side of human supremacy, which in the long run really doesn’t have a bright side.

I worry that the overview effect forgets about salamanders and baby birds, about soil and reefs, in the same way I worry about the implications of SETI searching distant planets for tech-savvy primates rather than for equivalents of the far-more-evolved bacteria, pollinators, and grasses who truly define life on this planet.

More Important Than We Are

The healthy, more rational version of the overview effect is to go outside into as natural a place as you can find and then look down at the world beneath your feet. There are endless ecologies in the soil, in your body, and in their interactions with all the plants and animals that surrounds us. Better yet, climb a tree or walk up a mountain, and gaze around at the integrity of life’s fabric, a fabric that includes all of us in its intricately threaded patterns.

But you don’t need to go above anything to feel awe at - and to see the wonder of - the marvel of life. Really, the deepest perspective comes from standing within life rather than above it. And when you do that, you understand that there isn’t an above or below. Life, from the swifts and spiders soaring at high altitude to the tubeworms and sea cucumbers undulating in the darkness of the ocean’s abyss, exists together in the thin green line encircling this third rock from the Sun.

To cherish the community of life on Earth, we have to recognize our place within that community. Seeing Earth from space is awe-inspiring, but we have to feel the same awe here on the ground, because that feeling is more likely to inspire a humility that recognizes that the community is more important than we are. That should be obvious, every day, but a culture of human supremacy has led us so far astray that we now absurdly wonder if we’re the only intelligent life around.

I addressed this in “We Are Not Alone”:

The most human question in the Anthropocene is “Are we alone in the universe?” It is also, in my opinion, insane. One glimpse at the blue-green globe, or for that matter one glance out your window, provides the answer. We have always been embraced by the community of life, and still are. We are woven into the global landscape, just as the microbial landscape is woven into us. We are surrounded by innumerable intelligences, all of which deserve our respect and study, and none of which we yet understand.

If we can’t experience the overview effect looking down at ants, mosses, and seawrack, then we’re not paying attention either to the Earth or to the message these astronauts are offering. As I see it, how we usually articulate the wonder of space travel suggests that moving outward and onward from Earth isn’t a sign of our evolving. It’s a function of our forgetting. If we feel a more intense frisson when looking at Earth from space than when falling to our knees to admire soil and the blue-eyed grass it miraculously generates, then emotionally we’re still living at far too great a distance.

In a nice case of synchronicity, at just posted her essay “barnacles in space,” which also seeks to bring the overview effect down to earth:

I am, of course, so glad that those astronauts are feeling the Overview Effect, but I can’t help thinking: do we really need to fling ourselves around the moon to feel this? Surely we don’t need to see the entirety of the earth to understand its beauty and fragility, to put ourselves in perspective and realise we are all interconnected, to feel inspired to protect and nurture this struggling planet of ours—surely, surely, all we need to do is look, and learn about the things we are looking at, right here, right down at our feet and up in our skies.

Human but not Humane

Much is said about astronauts carrying our dreams skyward, about space programs building on our communal genius to take humanity out to the stars. But whose dreams, and what humanity?

If “we” are going nobly into space and to the Moon, then “we” are also impoverishing and neglecting billions of people. Those in support of manned space exploration cannot insist that the people only look upward in admiration.

Down here, we also look around at what mess is being left behind, at who continues to suffer, and at the shaky rationale for trillions of dollars in spending for an adventure which is human but not humane. From up there, we must admit that the grandeur of the overview omits the poverty of our empathy.

Our actions now are a window into both past and future. I am amazed at what space programs have accomplished, grateful for those astronauts bringing a message of care and respect back through the burning atmosphere, but doubtful that the questing outward toward the Moon and Mars can coexist with the necessary focus on fixing the future we’ve made.

(And I doubt that colonization of either will happen, as I laid out in my pair of essays on prospective Moon development: “Shoot the Moon” and “McMurdo on the Moon”.)

Becoming Conscious

One function of our miraculous atmosphere is to protect all of life from the constant bombardment of high-energy radiation from cosmic rays and the Sun. Astronauts are exposed to this radiation, which poses an existential risk to our imagined life beyond Earth. The exposure is invisible, except for the phenomenon of Astronaut’s Eye. As they close their eyes to sleep, white streaks flash across their vision as high-energy particles passing through the spacecraft strike their optic nerves or retinas.

It’s a reminder that the overview message astronauts bring back is as much about the stark antibiotic physics of space as it is about the miracle of life on Earth. Their eyes are a window into the lifelessness that surrounds us.

Without pushing the analogy too far, my experience in Antarctica provided something like the overview effect (the underview effect?). Most of Antarctica feels like a terrestrial Moon, a lifeless ice cap so distant from the warm world that anyone paying attention is soon overwhelmed by their insignificance in a universe of cold physics. Looking homeward through the window of our pale blue sky, I was both in love with the emptiness and struck by the absolute need to embrace and be embraced by life.

And that’s what I want to close with, that this message from beyond the atmosphere about devoting ourselves to protecting the beauty and fragility of Earth, can be delivered by someone who understands what that devotion really means. I’ll post below a really wonderful short video posted by former astronaut Ron Garan on Big Think, titled “I went to space and discovered an enormous lie.” Garan is not blind to the dead-end of human supremacy nor the fatal folly of thinking we can treat the Earth as a resource rather than a community to which we owe everything.

“The problem,” he says, “is that we don’t see ourselves as planetary.” Reality is planetary, but humans are living a fiction in which economics are imagined as more important than ecology. To survive, we need to evolve beyond that fiction and back toward reality. Up in orbit, Garan says,

I saw an iridescent biosphere teeming with life. I didn't see the economy. But since our human-made systems treat everything, including the very life-support systems of our planet, as the wholly owned subsidiary of the global economy, it's obvious from the vantage point of space that we're living a lie. We need to move from thinking economy, society, planet to planet, society, economy. That's when we're going to continue our evolutionary process.

Garan also understands that we belong to the Earth rather than fantasizing that the Earth belongs to us:

One of the the things that I realized during my time in space is that we're not from Earth, we're of Earth. And to take that one step further is that we're not in the universe, we are the universe. We are the universe becoming conscious of itself.

Well, I doubt we know enough about the universe or consciousness to claim we’re on the map of either. But he is an optimist who, I have to admit, has arrived back here on Earth with a message that makes a lot of sense:

In the long term, I'm very optimistic, because I do see quite clearly a blossoming unity spreading across our planet, a blossoming awareness of our interdependent nature. That awareness will eventually reach critical mass and when it reaches critical mass, then we'll be able to solve the problems facing our planet. And it should give us courage during these dark times to keep doing what we know to be right and to not give up hope, because we are going to see the dawn.

Please watch this:

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

From and Nature Briefs, “The field biologist who helped redefine conservation,” a review of Homesick for a World Unknown: The Life of George B. Schaller. Schaller is “widely regarded as the most important field biologist of the twentieth century, a figure whose work reshaped zoology, conservation biology, and the way humans think about animal lives.” He began by studying mountain gorillas:

Schaller did something radical in its simplicity. He went to live near them without a gun, refused to assert dominance, and waited. What emerged was the first sustained, close-range study of gorillas in the wild, revealing animals that were social, restrained, and far more complex than prevailing caricatures allowed.

This approach—entering an animal’s world on its terms, over long periods, with minimal interference—became Schaller’s defining method. He would go on to apply it to lions in the Serengeti, tigers in India, snow leopards in the Himalayas, jaguars in Brazil, pandas in China, and antelope across the Tibetan Plateau.

From Yale e360, “Rusting Rivers,” an account of a terrible change happening to Arctic rivers. Linked to thawing of permafrost as the Arctic heats rapidly in the changing climate, rivers are turning bright orange and becoming so acidic that very little life survives. The phenomenon is growing quickly.

From the Revelator, why insects matter, and how to help them thrive in your yard and garden.

From the Times, the Senate has passed a bill that would allow a destructive copper mine to be built next to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota, one of the last great wild areas in the U.S.. It’s a typically disturbing and outrageous decision, and one that will reverberate for many years. The mine is not a done deal, however, as the Times points out:

The vote on Thursday increased the chances that Twin Metals Minnesota would build the mine, though the project still faces other obstacles, including expected legal battles and the need to obtain federal leases and state permits.

From and Chasing Nature, “The Robin at the Window,” another lovely and powerful essay, this one blending personal grief with patriotic grief and the story of the American Robin, a bird as beautiful, persistent, and occasionally aggressive as its namesake nation. Bryan’s partial obituary here is for Terry Allen, whose here on Substack has been a wonderful archive of photojournalism and notes on human nature.

From and Earth Hope, “I dream of grasshoppers,” a lovely short personal essay on a childhood in China, a fondness for clouds of insects, and an appreciation of Henry David Thoreau.

Share

Hello everyone:

This is a difficult topic and long essay. I hope you’ll take the time, as I have, to consider this vital story. The fate of tens of billions of wild animals is the backdrop to our ethical quandary regarding feral cats.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

Everywhere on Earth

I’d never had reason to consider the problem of feral cats until I was deep into a ten-day hike on Stewart Island in the far south of New Zealand, sometime in the late 1990s. The island is still one of my favorite places on Earth, a large nearly sub-Antarctic island with one small fishing/tourist town backed by miles and miles of wild, rainy, storm-tossed forest at the edge of the world.

Among the dozens of birds on the island, bellbirds and tuis sing the forest into life, kiwis and wekas haunt the underbrush, yellow-eyed penguins and oystercatchers greet the tide, while shearwaters and mollymawks soar between breaker and gale. There are 28 km of roads to drive on, and 280 km of trails to hike. Year after year, I went back to the island, and to that long hike, during my decade of looping through Antarctica, New Zealand, and Maine.

Once, on the far side of the island, maybe five or six days in, I had just left a hut for another day of muddy walking through deep green fern-filled forests and along miles of empty windy beaches. And then I saw a cat. It appeared cautiously out of the bush atop a sandy coastal cliff, without acknowledging me, before disappearing back into the forest. And suddenly the scale and scope of the planet’s feral cat problem became real for me.

It wasn’t just that this cat was somehow at home in the wild many miles from town on this large impenetrable swampy island. And it wasn’t just the horror of imagining the innumerable victims of this cat and its brethren, over many decades, in a place full of native birds and other species who have not evolved with any of the usual feline, canine, or mustelid predators. It was the realization that if feral cats were there, at the edge of the world, then they were everywhere on Earth, in numbers and with consequences that would be hard to imagine.

Wild Thing?

To be feral is to live in a tangle of wildness and neglect. Once a part of human society, feral animals have either slipped away or been cast aside. A typical definition - “existing in a wild state, especially describing an animal that was previously kept by people” - makes clear that being feral means existing in the ever-widening gap between what we call civilization and what we call nature.

Our empathy waxes and wanes when we consider a list of feral animals around the world. I dislike feral cats for eating native birds but worry about the fate of feral dogs in Ladakh and feral horses roaming the western U.S.. I think pigeons (feral rock doves) on the streets of NYC are beautiful, but understand that millions of intelligent feral hogs tearing up habitats across North America need to culled. And how should I feel about the million feral camels in Australia?

Cats are the most widespread and most harmful to native wildlife of all the feral species that have slipped the bonds of human company, or who have been thrown away by a throwaway society. Of the estimated 600 million to one billion cats in the world, most (480 to 600 million) are feral. The consequences for other species that fall prey to cats, as I outlined last week, are enormous.

The strong feelings that we have about the problem of feral cats are rooted in whether we see them as an incredibly predatory invasive species posing as wild animals, or as abandoned pets who need our help. Both are tragic stories, and both are at least partly true, but there is only one ecological truth here: Feral cats kill far more wildlife than domestic outdoor cats, and the impact of their killing many billions of animals is felt across the globe.

Sharp Fragments

Feral cats are an artificial fragment introduced to a fragmented natural world. Here’s a story of city outskirts and the suburbs: Fill in the wetlands, cut back most of the forest, pave the fields for homes and roads, leave only scraps of habitat, and then introduce a community of cute fuzzy perfect hunters to scavenge among the struggling native species.

Yet the cats struggle too. Feral existence is marked by far more disease, roadkill, and hunger than occurs in house cats. It is rarely a good life. One study found that 75% of feral kittens die within six months, mostly from physical injuries. A statement from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) outlines in gruesome detail the suffering of outdoor cats, argues that no cats should be living outside unless fully cared for, and concludes that it’s often better to euthanize cats who cannot be domesticated.

When well-meaning neighbors feed these “community cats,” they prolong the cats’ difficult lives and worsen their ecological impact. Cats are obligate carnivores, so even a reliably fed stray will continue to stalk and hunt and kill. They end up as invasive predators under our protection, rewarded for their killing yet rarely hunted by native predators like coyotes or wolves. Like us, they are neither truly wild nor a balanced link in the food chain. Like us, they take much more from the world than they contribute.

What the Mountain Knows

At the risk of sounding like a Boston native describing traffic on the Southeast Expressway, feral cats are one more example of a “wicked problem,” which are proliferating in the Anthropocene. Characterized by social complexity that defies solution, wicked problems like poverty, climate change, and contamination of drinking water haunt our shared future. As we torque Earth’s atmosphere and oceans while fracturing her living systems, we create problems that defy ordinary debate and resolution. Just to cite one recent example, there’s a plan by owl-loving wildlife managers to cull half a million barred owls whose rapid spread westward (because of our changes to climate and habitat) threaten the existence of spotted owls in the Pacific Northwest.

The ethics of shooting these owls, cats, and camels are as heartbreaking as the logistics. These are problems of our making, and the solutions are our responsibility. Yet again and again we either identify the animals as the problem or deny the problem exists, which only makes it worse.

It raises hard questions: How do we justify culling these marvelous animals if we also acknowledge that their predatory lives on the margins of society are not their fault? In a world disrupted by human activity, how logical is it to prioritize wildlife over feral cats? Aren’t feral cats just doing their best to become natural predators in an ecosystem? Who are we to intervene? Who gets to decide what’s best for the cats?

And we must admit that these millions of semi-wild cats are still cats, with rich social lives, endearing characteristics, and a lovely purr when happy. The potential of those lives, if lived within the bounds of human care and protection, is beautiful and extraordinary.

But if potential is our measuring stick, then we must also remember the global blossoming that would occur if feral cats were not out there shredding the fabric of life. Each year, there would be billions more birds, tens of billions more small mammals and reptiles and dragonflies, and so much more. The reduction in the landscape of fear in a world without feral cats, would bring that fabric in closer to us and our daily lives, which would be another source of joy. We’re happiest when nature is close at hand. The soft cats under our needy hands are, after all, a proxy for that need to reconnect with nature.

Again, I think it’s best to fall back on the deepest of truths, which are expressed by the world that has nurtured our species. As fragmented and upended as nature is, it should still guide us. Aldo Leopold articulated the guiding principle in A Sand County Almanac:

A thing is right when it tends to protect the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

We need, Leopold says, to “think like a mountain,” to remember back a thousand years to understand what the biotic community is, and what it needs.

And the mountain knows that the cats do not belong.

Seeking An Ethical Strategy

What, then, do we do? What we’ve been doing - where we’re doing anything - has not been working.

The primary strategy for controlling feral cat populations is TNR - Trap, Neuter, Release. Cats are captured, brought to a vet for spaying/neutering, marked to avoid unnecessary future capture, and then released back into the colony. If enough cats are controlled in this way, its advocates say, the population will stop growing and then decline. Unfortunately, the logic is better than the results.

The research, again and again, finds TNR to be ineffective. Too few cats are captured, for one thing. If even a minority of cats aren’t neutered, their breeding rate will outpace the control. Worse, people continue to abandon their cats or kittens in areas where community cats are fed and TNR is practiced, assuming their cats will be cared for.

It’s no doubt true that, as advocates point out, there is a lack of resources for TNR in some places. But TNR has, at best, stabilized rather than reduced feral cat populations. And then there’s the ethical problem. Here’s PETA’s statement:

Having witnessed the painful deaths of countless feral cats, we cannot in good conscience advocate trapping, altering, and releasing as a humane way to deal with overpopulation and homelessness.

And here’s one from The Wildlife Society:

Additionally, a strong argument can be made that returning (or re-abandoning) domestic cats to range freely is not an ethical strategy because of ongoing risks to the cats, other domestic animals, wildlife, and people.

Neither organization goes on to say much about euthanizing or otherwise culling feral cat populations, but beyond a tiny minority of cats that might be placed with caregivers, or the unfunded fantasy of creating large-scale fenced-in cat sanctuaries where neutered cat communities can live out their lives without harming wildlife, killing cats must remain part of the conversation.

Cat-astrophic

The argument for killing feral cats is easier - if still terrible - in those parts of the world where cats never belonged and where the consequences are the most stark. A Times article notes that Australia, where cats have contributed to the extinction of 34 animals, “has no native feline species but is home to a menagerie of slow-to-reproduce, snack-size mammals.”

The article describes walking into an outback office for a conservation group tasked with protecting threatened native marsupial species and finding a small pile of cats shot by a hired sharpshooter the night before:

It was a scene to make most any cat lover squeamish, and Dr. Moseby, who grew up with pet cats, once would have been “outraged” by the idea of killing them, she said. But after repeatedly discovering the half-eaten carcasses of greater bilbies and burrowing bettongs, just two of the reserve’s vulnerable residents, she had come to a stark conclusion: “You have to make a choice between cats and wildlife.”

And in many places Australia is making that choice for wildlife. Between 2015 and 2018, Australia killed 844,000 feral cats with poison and traps. A 2024 Guardian article describes a shooting campaign in the national parks of New South Wales as an attempt to slow the bleeding from the estimated 5 million deaths per day of native birds, mammals, reptiles, and frogs.

In New Zealand, too, as I’ve written about, the calculus is pretty clear. Many native species will only survive if cats and other introduced predators are eliminated. Some bullet points from Predator-Free Rakiura on the threat are instructive:

• In 2021, in Central Otago, a single cat ate 28 native lizards in a single sitting, including McCann’s skinks and schist geckos.

• Another case recorded a cat devouring 107 bats (our only native land mammal) in a week.

• In a single weekend in 2024, a feral tomcat decimated a colony of endangered Tarapirohe/black-fronted terns and their chicks and eggs, destroying 87 nests along the Clarence River. Only eight nests survived.

• At Kaikōura, tūturiwhatu/banded dotterels face relentless predation from both feral and domestic cats. In one breeding season, 46 nests were established, yet only two chicks survived to adulthood.

Today, on Rakiura/Stewart Island, large-scale operations using poison and traps are already underway to clear the entire island of cats, rats, and stoats. I think it’s hard, even for cat lovers, to argue against the necessity, even as we all cringe at the reality.

But in Hawaii, “the extinction capital of the world,” protests erupted after state authorities passed a ban on feeding feral cats in some areas, despite the devastation from the state’s hundreds or thousands of feral cat colonies on many native species. A 2024 Vox article explains that the problem is literally everywhere:

even if the cat colonies are in urban or suburban areas, they can still do damage to threatened species. That’s the thing about Hawaii: Endangered species are everywhere, not only in reserves but in parking lots and golf courses. What feeding does, ecologists told me, is help sustain these colonies.

Because this is a wicked problem, Hawaii has found it easier to build miles of predator-proof fencing around seabird colonies than to deal effectively with the problem at the source.

High-Hanging Fruit

In this dilemma, justifying the killing of feral cats on remote islands or in nations with no native cat species is the relatively easy, low-hanging fruit. The cost of their presence is far too high, the impossibility of relocating them far too likely, and the value of creating predator-free oases for the protection of threatened birds and other species in an otherwise disrupted world is far too great.

But in urban areas or regions where some kind of native feline predator exists, and where endangered species don’t wander around parking lots, the calculus is less clear. The arguments against aggressive removal are stretched between two poles: empathy for the cats and benefits for us. Neither, however, seem supported by the science.

As I noted above, the life of a feral cat, even if reliably fed by volunteers, is shorter, rife with disease, and marked by injuries or violent deaths. Remember that even PETA does not consider the life of a feral cat to be a humane existence. The idea that hundreds of millions of cats should be allowed to live a life of increased suffering because of our empathy for them seems strange and selfish, if we can zoom out far enough.

But if we zoom in, and imagine being the hand that feeds them, it feels like love in action. And we’re rewarded for our love with whatever oxytocin-laden affection comes from these free-ranging cats. A not-very-convincing list of “benefits” to us from feral cat communities, as summed up by Alley Cat Rescue, centers on how the cats make us feel good while also reducing mice and rat populations. This a) assumes that we’d be devoid of pleasure without the feral cats, and b) ignores the research that finds cats aren’t particularly effective at mice and rat control. As a Feral Atlas essay on the impact of Wisconsin dairy farm cats on wildlife noted,

Researchers have found that cats do not effectively reduce populations of Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) or house mice (Mus musculus). Rather than hunting these two introduced species as humans hope they will, cats are often more likely to prey on native wildlife.

Moreover, these cat colonies act as reservoirs for diseases which can spill over into human and wildlife populations. The American Veterinary Medical Association lists those which pose a threat to public health:

Zoonotic concerns include viral (e.g. rabies), bacterial (e.g. Yersinia pestis, Francisella tularensis, Campylobacter spp., Bartonella spp.), fungal (e.g. Microsporum canis), and parasitic (e.g. Cryptosporidium spp., Toxacara cati, Toxoplasma gondii, Cheyletiella spp.) diseases.

Of these, perhaps the most notable is the parasite Toxoplasma gondii because of its additional threat to wildlife. The Vox article lays out its impact in Hawaii:

Toxo has killed at least a dozen federally endangered Hawaiian monk seals, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The parasite has also been linked to the death of several bird species and even spinner dolphins, according to the state.

Still, though, our empathy for cats - as expressed through political willpower - often dominates the discussion. After an outcry, plans by the National Park Service to trap and remove a beloved horde of cats from the streets of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, were shelved. The Feral Atlas essay notes that a proposed law in Wisconsin to allow culling of free-ranging cats was shouted down, despite enjoying majority support from voters. And in Hawaii, cat-lovers found ways to feed the cats despite the ban.

All of which means that in much of the world, good policy to fix this wicked problem is often still far out of reach.

A World Without Feral Cats

We can’t really quantify the benefits of cats in our lives. Those of us who love them simply love them for their companionship, grace, independence, and more. But we can quantify the cost of outdoor cats to wildlife, and by any genuine measure it’s far too high a price to pay. For this reason, we have to love both house cats and wildlife while turning against the existence of feral cats. We can do this with love and respect and a dedication to humane treatment, but it needs doing.

This division starts with language, with “feral”. Though they are identical in all but their behavior and setting, we label feral cats as distinct entities in order to separate our feelings and our actions. For most of these semi-wild cats, we can’t undo either the wildness or the neglect. Which means we have to treat them differently.

Love and empathy are part of the resistance to culling or isolating cat communities, but it’s a love that’s blind to the needs of the much larger, much more important living world. A defense of feral cats without true regard for their prey may seem like a reasonable choice, but I see it as yet another aspect of our ecological amnesia.

We’ve forgotten the lushness of life that recently surrounded us, and accepted its pale shadow rife with an excess of cute furry predators. Even in urban and suburban areas, which we think of as devoid of wildlife, the removal of outdoor and feral cats can invite those species back in, and help societies rewild those urban spaces.

To evolve toward a world without feral cats - which would be a more humane world - the to-do list begins at home and scales up to national policy:

• Don’t let our cats out to roam. This should be both personal and public policy.

• Don’t abandon our cats or kittens outdoors. Programs to accept unwanted cats should be fully funded, and abandonment should be penalized.

• Spay and neuter house cats, and fully fund programs that spay and neuter feral cats.

• Stop feeding strays and ferals. Feeding does not stop the hunting and prolongs a life full of suffering.

• People whose cats harm wildlife should be treated by the law as it treats people whose dogs harm wildlife.

• Replace TNR with policies measured as much by their effectiveness as by their humaneness. This includes humane euthanasia wherever necessary. The more impact cats are having on threatened species, the more euthanasia and culling will be required.

When I think back to my years of walking around the wild coastline and forests of Rakiura/Stewart Island, I remember it as incredibly lush: The bellbirds, kiwis, and penguins, the tree ferns and gale-bent manuka. Now, as the massive Predator-Free Rakiura program is underway, I wonder how much lushness I was missing after a century of cats, rats, and other species diminished the island’s flora and fauna. I don’t know if I’ll make it back to the island again, but I’m happy knowing that in some places in the world, at least, we’re taking responsibility for some of our disruption, however cute and fuzzy it might be.

For more on this difficult topic, you might want to read (as I have not) the book, Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, by Peter Marra, head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. Or you can watch a talk by Marra posted by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

Looking for a beautiful children’s book about nature? I highly recommend Goldfinches, an extraordinary illustration by Maine author/illustrator Melissa Sweet of Mary Oliver’s poem by the same name. Each page is a brightly layered world to explore.

From Yale e360, “Why Protecting Flowers is Crucial to Our Future,” an interview with the amazing naturalist David George Haskell about his new book, How Flowers Made Our World. Some of you might remember Haskell from his role in the documentary film, Observer, which I wrote about last year. He’s always brilliant and exuberant in his love of the natural world. Here he is describing flowers:

Beauty is a flower’s way of speaking the language that animals understand. Pollinating insects are an example. Insects were mostly nothing but trouble for plants for three or four hundred million years, until flowering plants flipped the narrative by providing aromas and rewards like nectar and pollen that the insects could eat. They turned former enemies into allies through interspecies communication. Evolution found a way for plants to tap into animals’ aesthetics, and flowers forged new bonds of cooperation that made their reproduction way more efficient.

From the great at Chasing Nature, “Power. Wealth. Success. Fame.”, an illustrated poem that subverts the social meanings of these words with an understanding of the deeper forces of nature that run the real world.

From Live Science, one of the most infuriating stories of our time - the deliberate poisoning of the entire planet with PFAS chemicals - articulated brilliantly in an interview with Mariah Blake, the author of a new book, They Poisoned The World. Blake describes PFAS as “the most insidious pollutants in all of human history.”

From ProPublica, the push by Republican-led states to provide legal shielding for oil and gas companies from the flood of lawsuits that seek accountability from these companies that have knowingly torqued Earth’s climate and threatened the stability of life across the globe.

From Inside Climate News, the Trump administration is proposing to cancel grazing leases on public lands for a major bison restoration program in Montana. The good news is that the legal language behind the proposal looks as indefensible as the move itself, and so may not survive the court challenges.

Share

Hello everyone:

I’ve been thinking about birds as spring migration season gets underway, and worrying about the millions of them who will die in collisions with windows. My essay “For the Birds” lays out the problem and some solutions. Please take a look.

This week, though, I’ve finally gotten around to writing about a much larger threat to birds. Cat-lovers, be good to me. I mean well.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

Killer

The cat of my childhood was named Dirigo. The word is a Latin verb that graces the Maine state flag and means “I lead.” But we didn’t call him that for very long. Early in his life, our neighbor Jane stopped by to say, with both good cheer and some concern, “You should do something about Killer the cat. He’s been sitting on top of my mother’s bird feeder.”

Killer was a wonderful house cat and a lethally efficient outdoor hunter. Once, to our amazement, he arrived at the front door with a weasel in his mouth, very proud of himself. He furiously stomped around on the porch when we wouldn’t let him in with the carcass. My mother did manage to slow down his persecution of the birds with a bell on his collar. Killer’s life was a good one, moving freely indoors and out, well-fed and well-loved and full of the kind of stalking and killing that cats are born to do.

We worried about his predation, and reduced it somewhat, but never tried to limit his time outdoors. The dogs went out to roam, the cat went out to roam, my brother and I went out to roam; that’s how rural and suburban life was for us then. Maybe it still is for some of you, your pets, and your children. Generally, though, because society worries too much about people and not enough about wildlife, dogs are leashed and kids live hyper-scheduled digital indoor lives, but cats still haunt the neighborhood.

And this oversight is killing up to four billion birds per year (and up to twenty billion mammals) in the U.S. alone. I’m here to say that’s far too high a cost to pay for the weird privilege of letting our beloved house cats and their feral cousins - a vast and protected horde of introduced predators - roam freely.

I❤️Cats

Here’s the usual disclaimer of those who write on this topic: I really like cats. Forced to choose, I’d take a dog over a cat, but grew up cheerfully with both and still love both. My family shared our home with the aptly-named Killer, then the aptly-named Grey Kitty (a stray my housemates and I adopted in college, who I then pawned off on my parents because I was traveling the world), and now my mother has Leo (a.k.a. Leonidas), a sweet and quirky male orange tabby.

Leo is the first cat we’ve restricted to indoor life. As consolation, my mother bought him a catio where he can watch, with tail twitching, the birds, chipmunks, and squirrels at the feeder. And he has the basement to hunt for the occasional mouse.

He’s an indoor cat because we know a lot more now about the scale of feline predation on birds and other wildlife. We’ve decided that our love for cats does not extend to ignoring their capacity for unnecessary death and destruction. All pet cats should be well-loved and well-tended, but within constraints set by our love of wild creatures.

This is not a red-in-tooth-and-claw nature problem. This is an Anthropocene dilemma. You and I have been born into an era in which all of life is under the human thumb. No place or species on Earth is unaffected by human activity. Which means that all that is wild is dependent upon who we are, how we act, and what we love. For the world to survive more or less intact, we must manage both our own behavior and the behavior of those species we’ve brought with us in our bulldozing journey across the globe. Cats, however beloved, are no exception.

Just as we are now trying to reduce the ecological impacts of cows, pigs, chickens, and other livestock, so should we rein in the harms of the 600 million to 1 billion cats that surround us globally. That cats are companions rather than food only increases our obligation. They have no other purpose than serving us.

Cats Kill

Every cat lover knows that cats are perfect. But they may not know that this is as true biologically as emotionally. All cats have the same evolutionary design. Your cats might be quirky or moody or lazy, and their fur colors and patterns might be quite different from each other, but beneath the skin they’re pretty much identical to each other and to the largest cats on Earth.

An evolutionary biologist, in a 2023 Scientific American interview, explained why across the entire Felidae family - from house cats to lions and tigers - their bodies and skulls differ only in size. “Ecologically,” she says, “cats all do the same thing. They're hard-core predators. They're carnivores.” She continues:

Cats have nailed one thing so well that they all do it and just come up with slightly different sizes. That's why they're perfect evolutionarily. They don't need variation. They might get bigger or smaller, but they don't change anything else, because they're just right otherwise. They're not jacks-of-all-trades; they're masters of one.

And what they’ve mastered is hunting for meat. Like their sharp claws, keen vision, stealthy movements, and astonishing agility, cats’ jaws tell the tale. Unlike dogs, wolves, bears, and other carnivores with incisors to cut and molars to grind, cats have only slicing teeth. “This difference,” she explains, “is why foxes are perfectly happy going through garbage, whereas leopards will kill livestock instead.”

A 2022 Hakai article paints a fine portrait of cats as hunters:

Domestic cats are rarely part of an ecosystem, and despite thousands of years of domestication, cats still prefer their food at 38°C—the lukewarm temperature of fresh blood. They are far more similar to their ancestors, African wildcats, than dogs are to wolves. Their ear flaps, with 32 muscles to rotate, are extraordinarily quick at picking up high-pitched sounds like a mouse’s squeak. Their eyes are enormous on a petite head and adjust to available light like the aperture of a camera. Whiskers give them a three-dimensional sense, their sheathed claws ensure silence, and they can jump vertically, up to five times their own height without effort.

The truth is that cats’ predatory behavior is much more hard-wired than in dogs. The evolutionary distance between your golden retriever and its wolf ancestor is enormous. But your cat, even if goofy and clumsy, is still a little tiger. And remember that none of us know what our cats do, or how their behavior changes, when outside and out of sight.

Cat Food for Thought

I want to be clear about the single greatest threat to birds and other wildlife. It’s us, not cats. When we cut down forests, erase grasslands, fill in wetlands, scar the land with roads, fill our buildings with glass windows, warm the Earth’s climate, poison vast swathes of farmland with pesticides, and yes, fill the fragmented world with cute and fuzzy perfect predators, we are responsible for plucking uncounted billions of birds and other animals from existence.

The graphic above does not account for human altering and destruction of habitat, but it does assess the other major threats to birds for which we are responsible. And of those, cats are estimated to be by far the worst.

I don’t want this essay to be about the numbers, but it’s vital that they be the background for the difficult discussion about how to reimagine the place of domestic and feral cats in this human-altered world.

With that in mind, here’s some cat food for thought:

• Up to 164 million cats in the U.S. (~75 million domestic, 30-80 million feral) kill an estimated 1 to 4 billion birds per year, and 7 to 20 billion mammals.

• Cats kill an estimated one million native birds per day in Australia. The dead include 338 native species, 71 of which are threatened. 84% of the mortality was caused by feral cats, the rest by free-roaming house cats. There are no native cat species in Australia.

• In Canada, estimates vary widely, but it seems likely that the country’s ~6 million cats are killing 100 to 350 million birds per year.

• The first study on the problem in China, in 2021, estimated that cats killed at minimum, per year, 4 billion birds, 6.7 billion mammals, 2.9 billion reptiles, 3.3 billion invertebrates, 2.6 billion fishes, and 2.5 billion amphibians.

• A 2011 study on the impact of invasive feral cats on islands around the world found that they “are responsible for at least 14% of global bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions and are the principal threat to almost 8% of critically endangered birds, mammals, and reptiles.”

• The Times wrote about a 2023 study that identified more than 2,000 species preyed on around the globe by domestic and feral cats: “Almost half of the species were birds, followed by reptiles and mammals. An unexpected number of insects were found, including monarch butterflies, pink-spotted hawk moths and emperor dragonflies.” Of those 2,084 species, nearly 350 are threatened or at risk.

This Elegant Assassin

That excellent Hakai essay offered a big picture view of “this elegant assassin”:

The International Union for Conservation of Nature Invasive Species Specialist Group lists cats as one of the 100 worst invasive species in the world. Their paw prints are all over the scene. Numerous studies have implicated cats in the global extinction of at least 63 species—40 birds, 21 mammals, two reptiles—and contributed to the endangered status of another 587 species.

This is a local problem occurring almost everywhere across the globe. Ask your nearest wildlife rescue facility about the harm cats can do. As a director of the Tufts Wildlife Clinic explained,

cat attacks are one of the most frequent causes of injury to wildlife that are brought to the veterinary school. Many of these injuries affect young wildlife that are naïve about predators. In the majority of cases, the injuries are fatal.

You get the picture. The world is full of carnivorous cats, domestic and feral, who are doing a lot of damage. But if you’re still convinced that your sweet, lazy cat isn’t one of those who hunts birds and other animals when roaming, that’s a possibility, but it’s more likely that the killing happens out of sight. One study that placed “KittyCams” on outdoor domestic cats found that only 23% of their prey were brought back to the house. 28% were eaten, and 49% were left at the kill site.

A Difficult One

When I wrote “For the Birds,” my essay on bird mortality from window strikes, a subscriber commented on the mortality by cats and the difficulty of convincing some cat owners to keep their cats inside:

When I talk to people about why their outside cats need to remain inside, these people look at me like I just knifed them. They see the life of an indoor cat to be a greater crime than all the kills the cat will make during a lifetime outside. It’s a hot topic for sure, but one that needs to be addressed.

A Canadian researcher told the CBC that the solution is simple yet seemingly impossible: “We know what to do with cats: keep your cat indoors. But it’s getting people to do it,” he said. “So how do you get people to do it? I don’t know. It’s a difficult one.”

Part of what makes the campaign to keep house cats indoors difficult is because it’s not good vs. evil. It’s a battle of empathies. I keep reminding myself that much of what motivates cat owners who let their cats roam is concern for the cat rather than a disregard for birds or other animals. And no one wants to be told that their empathy is misguided, especially by people they perceive as cruel.

I grew up thinking that an outdoor cat was normal and appropriate. Of course, the unspoken wisdom said, a hunter should be allowed to hunt. But awareness of the Anthropocene means awareness of a deeper normal than what surrounds us in this brief weird moment. The conversation about cats is haunted by our ecological amnesia about what the fabric of nature should look like, and by our historical amnesia about where cats do and don’t belong.

The Well-Being of All Life

As with most of what ails us in the Anthropocene, I think the path forward requires expanding our empathy beyond our personal lives to the well-being of all life. Cat lovers are bird lovers too. Within expansive empathy there’s more room for a rational decision based on trusted information.

I recommend reading the American Bird Conservancy’s (ABC) “Keep Cats Indoors” site and a good Q&A at Cornell’s All About Birds. Both are by bird lovers who are also cat lovers. The ABC’s resources are more comprehensive, and Cornell has an excellent set of bullet points. Here’s a combined gist:

• Cats are nonnative predators, and their populations (domestic and feral) are far larger than native predators. Thus they have an outsized impact on native species already pushed to the brink by other human-caused threats.

• Indoor cats live healthier and longer lives. Indoor cats won’t get run over, poisoned, hunted by larger predators, or sick from toxoplasmosis, rabies, feline leukemia, feline immunodeficiency virus, feline herpes, tapeworms, and fleas. (And indoor cats won’t transmit toxoplasmosis or rabies to their owners.)

  • The KittyCam study, which took place in Athens, Georgia, noted that 85% of monitored outdoor cats exhibited at least one risky behavior. 45% of cats crossed roads, 20% entered dangerous crawlspaces and storm drains, and 25% interacted with unfamiliar cats, increasing their risk of disease transmission.

• Outdoor cats will hunt even if well-fed. It’s their nature.

Knowing all this makes confining a cat to an indoor life easier, but I know it’s not necessarily easy. Part of me wants Leo to have the life that Killer had. I feel a slight tinge of guilt whenever I see him flicking his tail and making little squeaky growls while watching birds and squirrels from the wrong side of the glass or catio fence. He lives a wonderful life, with lots of birds to watch, yet he could be more free. But that’s true of all pets; they could all be more free. Our relationship with dogs, cats, and other kept animals is riddled by the shaky ethics that come with ownership of another species.

Further, I know that it would have been difficult to restrict Killer to an indoor life after years of being a free-roaming cat. When I ask here that everyone keep their cats in, I acknowledge that it may be much harder to do bring outdoor cats in than to keep them in from the beginning.

Helpfully, the American Bird Conservancy has a comprehensive page for cat-owners looking to transition their outdoor cat indoors, with resources for catio enclosures, harnesses/backpacks/strollers for taking your cat out and about, indoor enrichment strategies, and - for those not quite ready to keep the cat inside - a description and effectiveness assessment of various anti-predation devices to put on the cat. The goal is to enrich the life of our cats while also protecting wildlife.

Finally, however tricky the ethics of cat ownership might be, they pale in comparison to the ethical quandaries of managing the lives and impacts of feral cats. Those lives are more difficult, and their impacts are much greater. I’ll explore some of it next week, including the tension between the social urges to either protect or eliminate feral cats, and the failure of humane strategies to curb feral cat populations.

And then there are the hard questions. In a world disrupted and fragmented by human activity, how logical is it to prioritize “wildlife” over feral cats? Aren’t feral cats just doing their best to become natural predators in an ecosystem, and who are we to intervene? How do we justify culling these marvelous animals if we also acknowledge that their predatory lives on the margins of society are not their fault? Who gets to decide what’s best for the cats?

Again, the answers to all these questions need to come from empathy for the well-being of all life. But, as I’ll get into next week, that doesn’t make them any easier.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

If you read nothing else, read this: From , the Trump administration has just, by a bland and quiet little executive order, dismantled the U.S. Forest Service. This should be front-page news and Congress should be resisting it with any and all measures, but it’s a blip in the dumpster fire we call the news cycle. The article is an excoriating response to yet another truly terrible escalation from the administration in its war against science and good regulation of extractive industries. Read all of it. Here’s the opening graf:

Late Tuesday afternoon, with the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency’s 121-year history. Not a budget cut. Not a policy shift. Not a “reorganization.” An execution.

From Orion, “Putting the Art into Artemis,” a lovely essay on the Moon and the wealth of cultural appreciation for it from around the world and across time. The essay is also an impassioned defense of this new age of lunar exploration, despite its costs:

The Latin root of “explore” means to “utter a cry.” Every song, every tale, every prayer, every painting about the Moon has been a flight to our companion world. It’s also kept us grounded on the Earth. Lunar culture is a double-perspective, then. We look up there from right here, and, in doing so, can see both more clearly.

Also from Orion, “All for One,” an important long-form call to arms for the labor movement and the climate movement to join forces against their shared enemies, those corporate and political powers who would burn the world down before offering respect to ordinary citizens and a fair wage to ordinary workers. “An injury to one,” the old labor slogan goes, “is an injury to all.”

From and The Crucial Years, “Night Into Day,” a hopeful update on the incredible growth in grid-scale battery technology that in a few short years may form the foundation for an entirely new and planet-friendlier energy system. Recently, he notes, 43% of the California grid was powered by batteries for a while after sunset, and that batteries remained above 20% for four hours. Remarkably, 90% of California’s grid battery system has been built in just the last five years. Looking ahead, solid state batteries that don’t use lithium or rare earth metals may dominate the nighttime grid.

From and Nature Briefs, a brief origin story for Mongabay, now one of the world’s best sources for global news on nature and conservation. It began as an idea and a guy in his pajamas working on a laptop. As it developed, Butler made the vital decision to turn the young eco-journalism project into a nonprofit that emphasized local reporting from local journalists working in remote places, and then later made a point of emphasizing solutions alongside the environmental problems that few other outlets reported on. The lesson he draws from the origin story, he says,

is simple and somewhat reassuring. You do not have to solve everything at once. You just have to begin somewhere, keep learning, and allow others to carry the work further than you ever could alone.

Two from Grist on agriculture: The need to increase research on Indigenous agriculture in order to scale up its lessons for making food systems more resilient in a hotter world, and how clever research with optic fiber cables has revealed that tilling is destroying the capacity of soils to hold moisture and nutrients.

From the Times, the economic value of flying foxes (large fruit bats) to the Australian economy is helping to change minds about these animals whose seed-laden poop both annoys people and replenishes forests. They are pollinators and seed-dispersers whose colonies can hold several hundred thousand bats:

“Australian flying foxes are the quintessential Australian character — they range across the landscape of droughts and flooding rains,” said Dr. Welbergen, who was not involved in the new study. “With their extreme mobility, bats are a glue that keeps the increasingly fragmented Australian forest landscapes together.”

He added that the flying foxes preserve “the genetic integrity of Australia’s forests. This is especially important as landscapes recover from fires that are becoming more frequent.”

From Heated, how the oil and gas industry in Texas has gotten away with dumping massive amounts of toxic and radioactive drilling waste onto the landscape without any kind of responsibility or obligation, even though the waste has poisoned workers and become the land under which homes and schools have been built.

Share

Hello everyone:

Please consider showing up at a No Kings rally near you this Saturday, the 28th. It’s vital that much of the U.S. (and elsewhere) get out in the streets to slow this descent into corrupt, white nationalist, anti-environmental, fossil-fueled autocracy. Showing up matters: It alerts others to the social movement and instills fear in those in power. Here’s on why this matters.

Remember also that the first Earth Day in 1970 brought out 20 million people, 10% of the population and still the largest one-day protest in U.S. history. Many of our most enlightened environmental policies were made possible by that event. We need that kind of participation in these No Kings events.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

The Scarcely-Remembered Ancestors

Virologist Jonas Salk was once as famous for choosing not to profit from the polio vaccine as he was for inventing it. Salk seemed particularly saint-like when, having saved untold millions of future children from a life of polio-twisted misery, he smiled at the idea of patenting the vaccine and asked (in an interview with Edward R. Murrow), “Could you patent the sun?”

Salk was insistent on what it meant to be good: “Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.” How we do that, he said, is straightforward: “If we want to be good ancestors, we should show future generations how we coped with an age of great change and great crises.”

In other words, doing the right thing isn’t merely about providing resources for our kids and grandkids. It’s about modeling for them and our grandchildren’s grandchildren how to do the right thing by providing a cultural memory of how we, the scarcely-remembered ancestors, did the right thing.

Salk’s advice is both relevant and poignant in this Anthropocene moment. A brief scan of the news reveals the corporate and political selfishness of the current spate of wars, the vaccine skepticism, and even a bizarre plan to profit off of the Sun. We would do well to remember Salk, keep him on his pedestal, and apply his wisdom to what lies ahead, which is already shaping up to be the greatest change, and most formidable crisis, in human history.

Pennies in the Can

The good ancestors in the polio story extend beyond Salk and his colleagues, and beyond the many volunteers who took the jab to test its efficacy and safety. We should also remember the eighty million Americans who donated to the cause, often with whatever coins they could spare for the March of Dimes. No matter how poor or how unlikely they were to be stricken with polio, many Americans were willing to sacrifice something for the common good by putting pennies in the can.

Noting that vast army of donors and the massive roll-out of vaccinations, one biographer of Salk likened the push for the polio vaccine to the invasion of Normandy. (This was the post-war era, when invasions could be a hopeful metaphor.) But the vaccine arrived in a time of much greater change, in what is now known as the Great Acceleration.

Beginning in the mid-20th-century, there was extraordinary growth in human population and its consequences, among them deforestation and overfishing, loss of wetlands and grasslands to agriculture, chemical and fertilizer production, dam-building and urban sprawl, energy use and atmospheric heating, and other forms of resource depletion and habitat destruction. (See the graphic above for some details.) The real world has been rapidly retreating from our built world ever since.

Our good ancestors (well, parents and grandparents) were good mostly in terms of quality-of-life improvements (like polio eradication) for people, usually related to medical advances and economic growth. Our civilizational model, however, ensured that moderate human advancement was built on radical environmental loss. While the polio virus might have seen the conquering army land on its shores, so did nearly every other species on Earth.

To be good ancestors, we must first be good neighbors to all of life. Anything less - any self-obsession in a zero-sum contest with the Earth - and it won’t matter how many pennies we put in the can. If our neighbors suffer and disappear, so will we.

Trends and Countercurrents

As biodiversity loss and atmospheric heating rapidly intensify, we should be asking who we are not only in this moment, but in the eyes of generations to come: Are we being good ancestors?

On one hand, nearly all harmful trends occurring on our watch – from ocean acidity to chemical pollution to habitat loss – seem to be moving irrevocably toward worst-case scenarios. Some of these will not be fixed on normal human timescales, likely haunting several generations to come. On the other hand, there are so many useful, beautiful countercurrents at work – from regulation to conservation to activism to art and scientific breakthroughs – by all sorts of people in all corners of the world.

And, it should be said, that the worst ancestors among us - those shaping this moment and the distant future with the leverage of wealth and power for their own dumb and selfish purposes - are a tiny minority, a minority whose actions are largely disliked by the rest of us trying to live ordinary lives. The question, then, is whether this makes us better ancestors because we’re powerless in the face of all that leverage, or worse because we refuse to use the immense collective power that we have to insist on a better world.

We don’t know yet how or when the tide may turn in the face of what seems like an array of impossible battles and irreversible tipping points. We can take some heart from the fact that so many social impossibilities – women’s right to vote or enter the military, gay or interracial marriage, legalized drugs – reached their tipping points and suddenly became everyday norms.

The Anthropocene Thought-Experiment

Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland (and many other superb books) and one of our best living writers on our relationship with the real world, has replied to the Are we being good ancestors? question in interviews. To the Guardian he said,

Mostly, I found the answer to be ‘no’. But I did find hope too. I found it in people – visionaries, altruists, scientists, activists – and in their refusal to settle for despair.

In a 2019 conversation with the great Barry Lopez about both Underland and Lopez’s book Horizon, Macfarlane referred to this new epoch as “the Anthropocene thought-experiment.” I have, ever since, found it very useful to think of our civilizational model as an experiment run by our ancestors, and now by us.

In my cartoon version, I picture Stone-Age humans sitting around one day in a Pleistocene conference room and some guy saying, “Hey, I got an idea. I’m just spitballing here, but what if we kill off all the world’s slow, tasty megafauna over the next several thousand years, then develop intensive agriculture, create division of labor and build cities, grow our population without regard for ecological limits, spread like wildfire across the planet, abuse the land and out-fish the oceans, then spew out CO2 like a supervolcano until we make the Earth unrecognizable? Just to see what happens?”

This of course is not what Macfarlane said… but he is reminding us that what we do, how we live, and the price we and the rest of life are paying, are all rooted in ideas, ideas which are just as susceptible to failure as they are to replacement.

And now that failure is obvious, replacement is necessary. This is the task that good ancestors must face up to.

Stories to be Rewritten

The ideas that got us here include human supremacy (only humans matter, and all life on Earth exists to serve our purposes), a refusal to consider ecological limits (despite those limits being rooted in physical laws), and a weird impulse to treat the abstractions of capital and corporation as more valuable than people or nature. It’s worth noting that there are plenty of corporations today who – note the implied personhood – would be happy to patent the polio vaccine, not to mention the sun. And yet we still put them on pedestals.

There’s a library of books to explore or explain all of this, so I’ll just say that every culture, and every path, whether they take us toward failure or success or something in between, is a story. The stories that created the Anthropocene, and that are creating a deeply disrupted and impoverished world for our descendants, need to be rewritten. We need lives whose meaning embraces the more-than-human.

Once we understand that we belong to the Earth (rather than it belonging to us), we see that life has inherent meaning, in which beauty and purpose are indistinguishable. It’s culture that can collapse into meaninglessness and take our sense of self down with it. (As a young man, when I began to understand the schism between culture and nature, I stopped worrying about “the meaning of life” and focused instead on our disruption of it.) To be good ancestors, we need a culture which exists in service to the living world. Otherwise, what’s the point?

“Sustainable” is not a cliché about canvas grocery bags; it’s an existential query about the purpose of our lives on a planet with ecological limits. Our claim to supremacy becomes even more absurd when we realize that our cultural norms are so clearly self-destructive.

Of course, since long before the Great Acceleration, many good souls have been trying to rewrite or at least resist these unsustainable stories. We know that people in power lose perspective, that human supremacy and corporate personhood are ridiculous, money is a seductive fiction, and one of the few truths about the universe we can confirm with our senses is that the living world is greater, wiser, and more resilient than we are. The majority of us who want to live ordinary lives want a different culture and a different path, one that helps us become better ancestors.

A Better Confederacy

America is as much a land of missed opportunities as a land of opportunity. This goes back to the beginning. In my friend Jennifer Lunden’s book, American Breakdown, she notes how much of our nation’s founding documents originated in the Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (usually referred to as the Iroquois Confederacy). Nearly a thousand years ago, five of the Confederacy’s nations - the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca – joined together under the strictures of the Great Law to bring peace to the region. (The sixth, the Tuscarora, joined in the early 18th century.) There’s ample evidence that its principles of a representative, three-branched government with checks and balances influenced the founders and the authors of the Constitution.

But in the founding of America there were two missing elements of the Great Law: matriarchy and sustainability. Regarding the first, the chiefs of the nations were men, but they were chosen by clan mothers, who also formed a council (a Supreme Court, in a sense) to settle disputes between chiefs. The women could impeach poor leaders and veto any vote that would lead to war.

As for the second, what America’s founders left out, Lunden writes,

was the directive to the chiefs of the Confederacy to make their decisions based on likely impacts seven generations into the future. In other words, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy incorporated a plan for sustainability into their constitution, and the Americans did not. Perhaps it’s time to campaign for another amendment.

Some of you will remember that I’ve written about state-level campaigns for Green Amendments, which add to the bill of rights in state constitutions the right to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment. The motivation for these amendments is explicitly multigenerational.

For an everyday translation of what all this might mean for a culture seeking to create good ancestors, here’s some advice from the Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons:

What Indians are about, I think, first of all is community. They’re about mutual support, they’re about sharing, they’re about understanding what’s common land, common air, common water, common and for all. They’re about freedom.

Invisible Triumphs

One of the hard things about the struggle to protect the environment is that defeat is an ugly tragedy while success is the status quo. If we win, whatever bit of the natural world is at stake simply keeps existing. Until recently, at least, we haven’t had to rebuild or create vibrant healthy ecosystems; we only had to protect them. As Rebecca Solnit says in her book Hope in the Dark,

Most environmental victories look like nothing happened; the land wasn’t annexed by the army, the mine didn’t open, the road didn’t cut through, the factory didn’t spew effluents that didn’t give asthma to the children who didn’t wheeze and panic and stay indoors on beautiful days. They are triumphs invisible except through storytelling.

Invisible triumphs, indeed. And what triumphs are greater and less visible than those viewed a century from now, or five centuries from now?

What triumphs, invisible or otherwise, can we expect in the Anthropocene? Even the optimists among us should admit that we have reached a point where many victories can only be measured by their reduction in future harm. Thresholds have been crossed that cannot be uncrossed, and species and ecosystems will disappear that are unlikely to reappear despite the best of human intentions.

That said, absolutely vital triumphs are possible. Keeping planetary heating to the tragedy of 2°C instead of ramping up to the horrors of 4°C or 7°C would be an astonishing success that would preserve a large proportion of life on Earth. Preserving in perpetuity entire ecosystems, particularly those that nurture high concentrations of biodiversity – rainforests, cloud forests, coral reefs, mangrove forests, vernal pools and other wetlands, for example – improves the odds that recognizable realms of life will be sustained through the coming heat and storm for our grandchildren’s grandchildren.

Continuing the History of Dignity

Barry Lopez is unsurpassed as a writer working at the meeting ground of nature and culture. His prose is as exquisite as his understanding of how far we have gone astray. Barry died of cancer in 2020, having lived just long enough to see a climate-driven forest fire rage through the Oregon forest and home he had loved for decades. (I’ve written about this here.) Today, the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art and Culture works with artists to chart the changing Earth and our relationship with it. “It has become necessary,” they write, “to imagine a very different future than the one we had hoped for.” They include this somber paragraph on their What We Do page:

Climate change is already transforming the planet, and by the end of the current century the landscape as we know it will be unrecognizable. Familiar cadences—from the arrival of migrating songbirds and the blossom of spring flowers to the chill of the first frost—will become unpredictable. Glaciers and rivers will disappear, summer skies will darken with smoke, and the land will fall silent. What will it mean when the places that have shaped and sustained us are gone? How will our understanding of the world change when there is no longer ice in the Arctic or wildlife in the forest? What are our obligations to the planet, and to each other?

Lopez, in that conversation with Robert Macfarlane I cited earlier, responded to the younger writer’s somber assessment of the fate of nature (and humans) in the Anthropocene with an affirmation. Everything Macfarlane speaks of will come to pass, he said, despite “the great webs of denial” in our society.

But Lopez went on to say, echoing Jonas Salk’s idea of the good ancestor, that we must now look for examples in history of people who lived under impossible burdens yet showed incredible courage and poise, despite having every reason to give up. “You may think they simply died with dignity,” Lopez says, “but no, they continued the history of dignity.” In doing so, they served as examples for their descendants (that’s us) who live in equally impossible times.

Now it’s our turn.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

If you read nothing else, read this: From and Nature Briefs, “A Profession Built on Hope, Strained by Loss,” an extraordinary short essay on why so many people working in conservation struggle to do the work in the face of so much difficulty and despair, and how some of that stress might be relieved:

If you are trying to protect life on Earth, you are working in an era defined by loss. Wildlife populations have declined sharply in recent decades. Fisheries are strained. The climate is changing fast enough that field realities often outrun the planning documents. For many conservationists, this is not an abstract set of trends. It is the ground beneath their boots, the water they dive into, the fading chorus of sounds on night surveys, and the animals they recognize as individuals.

There is grief in that, and also something sharper: the feeling that suffering is not accidental. Much of it is caused by choices people make and systems people defend. When you work close to the damage, the losses do not always feel like “nature.” They feel like consequences.

That can produce what some people describe as moral injury: the distress that can come from witnessing harm, caring deeply, and still feeling unable to stop it. Even when you are doing everything you can, the scale of what you cannot change can crush you. Day after day, you may find yourself asking a question you do not want to ask: Is any of this enough?

From the Times, a sperm whale birth in the wild was filmed, revealing that the mother and baby had assistance from several other whales, only some of whom were related. It’s a beautiful bit of documentary footage, and further proof that other species have communal involvement in a birth.

From Vox, some modest good news about monarch butterfly populations. The long-term decline has stopped, and their numbers have stabilized, but they’re still too low. The hope is that the good work being done to safeguard their migration routes will begin to rebuild the species.

From Common Dreams, Forests, Not Data Centers: A Better Plan for Rural Prosperity, a wise plea to think through the enormous and unnecessary waste of the data center expansion to the much smarter, longer-term investment in the forests those centers often threaten:

Nature is our lifeline. Technology cannot replace it.

That truth is the heart of a growing conflict in rural America. As data centers and AI infrastructure are sold to communities as “innovation,” “jobs,” and “the future,” we’re being asked to trade away the natural systems that have always sustained us: forests, clean water, a stable climate, and the human need for connection with each other and the natural world.

From the Guardian, a new report, State of the Global Climate from the World Meteorological Organization, highlights the extraordinary energy imbalance of the rapidly heating Earth, describing the planet being “pushed beyond its limits:”

More than 90% of that excess is absorbed by the oceans, which experienced the highest heat content in history last year. The rate of ocean warming has more than doubled over the past two decades, compared with the average over the previous 45 years.

The authors of the latest annual State of the Global Climate report say this highlights the increasing vulnerability of a planet that is moving ever further out of balance as a result of human activity. The burning of oil, gas, coal and forests releases heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, which are all at their highest level in at least 800,000 years.

From Undark, a long-form dive into the extraordinary difficulties (botanical and bureaucratic) in combating Arundo donax, an invasive plant that has accompanied humans on our spread across the globe. The article focuses mainly on Texas and California, but our relationship with the plant goes back to Mesopotamia.

For thousands of years, Arundo donax has spread across the globe, wreaking havoc on the riparian ecosystems it invades. The plant’s kaleidoscopic utility — it has been used by humans for everything from construction materials to musical instruments — ensured its rapid territorial expansion as it followed human migrations, and infestations can now be found on every continent in the world except Antarctica. Likely arriving in North America alongside Spanish colonizers in the 17th and 18th centuries, Arundo now bedevils waterways in at least 25 states, vigorously spreading through a form of asexual reproduction that results in vast thickets of genetic clones. In the areas it overtakes, Arundo often outcompetes nearly every native species, forming robust monocultures that destroy habitat, consume huge amounts of water, and pose increased risk of fires and floods. In California, where the plant was first rigorously studied in the 1990s, one scientist labeled it the “greatest threat” to that state’s riverside ecosystems. And in Texas, along the Rio Grande, the plant now covers tens of thousands of acres.

From Inside Climate News, freshwater migratory fish are in steep decline all around the world:

Declining faster than many terrestrial populations, 325 migratory freshwater fish species have been identified as candidates for urgent conservation efforts by the United Nations’ Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS). These populations—critical for river health and economic output—have already declined by over 80 percent since 1970.

Two more from the Guardian: First, the first two weeks of the Iran war have been a disaster for the climate, releasing among the dark toxic clouds the equivalent CO2 of Iceland’s annual emissions.

And in an op-ed, George Monbiot brilliantly identifies the problem of fossil fuels as the source problem for much of what ails civilization, and points to the extraordinary value in ridding ourselves of their toxic, power-hungry talons:

Oil did not cause capitalism, but it has massively extended and empowered it. Reduce our dependency on oil, and we disrupt some of the world’s most violent and exploitative relations. We defuel dictators and war machines, coups and assassinations, invasions and nuclear threats. It’s not everything of course: there will still be water wars, land wars and mineral wars to be fought: after all, the military machine can’t just sit there rusting. But it’s a lot.

From Grist, $4/gallon gasoline is the tipping point when EVs make better financial sense than gas- or diesel-burning cars.

Share

Links:

Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393242140

o   New York Times review of Underland: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/books/review-underland-robert-macfarlane.html

Brief bio of Jonas Salk from the Salk Institute website: https://www.salk.edu/about/history-of-salk/jonas-salk/

Video clip of Salk’s interview with Murrow:

Guardian interview with Robert Macfarlane: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/22/robert-macfarlane-are-we-being-good-ancestors-mostly-no

Video of Robert Macfarlane and Barry Lopez in conversation:

About Jennifer Lunden’s American Breakdown: https://jenniferlunden.com/about-american-breakdown/

Haudenosaunee Confederacy: https://www.haudenosauneeconfederacy.com/confederacys-creation/

Green Amendment: https://forthegenerations.org/

Excellent “Brain Pickings” essay on Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/16/rebecca-solnit-hope-in-the-dark-2/

Barry Lopez Foundation for Art and Culture: https://barrylopezfoundation.org/what-we-do/

Hello everyone:

We had a good storm pass through a few days ago, with high seas and higher winds. Every storm is a reminder of the energy that surrounds us, sustains us, and shakes us out of our expectations. With that in mind, I wanted to reintroduce you to an essay of mine from a couple years ago (now shorter and rewritten) that celebrates storms and provides some Anthropocene context.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

Like it or not, the scale of human impacts on all of life means we now “manage” the Earth. Or as Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog warned us a half-century ago, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

We are not yet good at it. Judging from the news, we can scarcely manage ourselves. Nonetheless, the underlying task behind all of our good efforts to cool the climate, and to patch up the fabric of life across continents and oceans, is to become rational and compassionate managers of the planet we’ve overrun. Or, ideally, we’ll restore enough of the planet so we can hand back much of the management to the species who are born knowing how to live.

They had, after all, been doing just fine for millions of years before yesterday’s arrival of our pop-up civilization.

The world is bacterial and fungal, leafy and woody, scaly and fleshy, furry and feathered, atmospheric and oceanic, stony and wet. Because it is alive and conscious, the world is sacred, though we forget that. And because we are nearly always caught up in our own species’ drama, we forget about the wild story happening all around us.

One of the best ways to reconnect, and to set aside our worries about the climate (whether political or planetary), is to be out in the wild weather. For us to thrive, our skin and senses need as much exposure to sun and rain as ferns.

And I think we all know, on some intuitive level, that we need storms to reframe our daily lives. Storms erase the chalkboard. They force us to check our supplies, rush to the market, make contingency plans, and upend our schedules. Storms remind us, amid our mismanagement of the Earth, that we too are being buffeted by greater forces.

Storms also kill and impoverish people, destroy crops and homes, and upend much more than schedules. This has always been true, and will continue to be true for as long as there are people, crops, homes, and schedules. Here on the resilient coast of a privileged nation, I don’t wish to diminish this truth, but neither do I want to focus on it this week. For all of life, storms have always been as much gift as curse. They transform. They are necessary turbulence.

The messier the storm, the cleaner the break. Don’t we all have memories of intense moments in a storm? I’ve watched trees uproot in New England hurricanes, shuddered as gale-driven waves broke completely over a New Zealand ferry, and been blown off my feet by katabatic winds hurling down an Antarctic glacier. There is awe in these moments, and awe awakens something wonderful within us amid the fear-tinged laughter.

Two coastal storms, a few days apart, tore up the Maine coast a couple years ago. The damage was historic, as record high tides combined with huge swells and hurricane-force winds to destroy wharves, homes, businesses, roads, and much more. Down the road from us, a house was lifted and rotated away from its chimney by the surge. Others had their seaside walls smashed in. A small working harbor lost five wharves and suffered serious damage to others. The harbor’s debris, when hauled off, filled forty-five dump truck loads. These scenes of wreckage and salvage repeated in hundreds of coves and harbors, peninsulas and islands, all along the coast.

At a famous lighthouse at the end of our peninsula, a 130-year-old brick bell house lost two of its walls to waves of enormous height and power. Elsewhere, the sea chewed away at shoreline roads, making them impassable. Stones seemingly floated ashore like broken buoys, turning yards into patios. Heavy seas pushed a footlocker-sized rock under a chain-link fence and into the middle of a tennis court.

As with any storm, there were moments of grace amid the chaos. The first was when an entire dining room floor, with an unscathed dining table surrounded by a jumble of chairs, stove, and cabinet, washed up intact on the shore of a place I look after. A century-old fish house and dock had been plucked from shore and then disassembled by the waves as it traveled a mile down the bay. All around that dining room, the cove was full of dock and house, trash and family treasure, all woven into a deep mat of seaweeds ripped off their stony anchors. Heather and I spent a day pulling lumber and furniture and trash from the cove, trying to keep the worst of it from floating back out on the next tide as pollution or navigation hazards.

The second moment came after I posted a picture of that furniture online and immediately heard from the owners, a family that has been in the area since the 1850s. They arrived with the next low tide, eager to salvage what they could of the family legacy. We walked the shore, picking up slide carousels and placemats, buoys and framed prints. One bit of art they were most excited to find was an old framed nursery rhyme titled “Whether the Weather.” It was hard to imagine a more suitable poem for the moment:

Whether the weather be fine, 
Or whether the weather be not, 
Whether the weather be cold, 
Or whether the weather be hot, 
We'll weather the weather, 
Whatever the weather, 
Whether we like it or not.

For the family, the impact of the storm was compounded by the cold ferocity of the insurance company, which refused to cover their loss.

For those of us who didn’t suffer as they did, the wildness of these storms was as refreshing as it was sobering. To feel a storm arrive, throb and roar against the granite shore, and then pass over, is to be shaken out of our complacency. In the hours we spent plucking things from a cold cove, Heather and I were far more connected to our cold digits than to our digital lives. The shape of the real world reappeared.

But I couldn’t avoid seeing the fingerprints of the Anthropocene everywhere, as messy as the swathes of shoreline debris. In an era of disrupted planetary norms and a hotter atmosphere, is a storm just a storm anymore?

Our fingerprints on storms range from the invisible to the catastrophically obvious. On one end of the scale, microplastics, combustion particulates, and PFAS chemicals float in the atmosphere alongside natural particles to act as precipitates for raindrops and snowflakes. What we pollute daily toward the heavens falls daily on our heads.

On the other end, we’ve burned so much carbon-rich stuff that we’ve changed the behavior of the atmosphere and ocean faster than life can adapt. In between, the forests that regulate the Earth’s climate - generating moisture, moving it across continents, and seeding clouds - are too often being erased. Even the scraggly spruce forests of coastal Maine have been replaced with the empty vacation homes of the wealthy.

Everywhere, the heat and turbulence that characterize our mismanagement of the Earth are both cause and effect. More burning makes more heat, and more disruption of the living world makes more turbulence in every planetary system.

The burgeoning field of attribution science makes these larger fingerprints readable, if still not precisely defined. We know with increasing certainty whether certain storms or other intense climatic events are more likely due to our transformation of the atmosphere. But that’s only a statement of odds. We can gesture at the pervasive plastic trash and blue styrofoam washed up in the cove and say, This is what we do. But we cannot point a finger at a storm and say, That’s us.

An Atlantic article suggests we should imagine the accelerating chaos of climate change through two specific concepts:

The first is nonlinearity, the idea that change will happen by factors of multiplication, rather than addition. The second is the idea of “gray swan” events, which are both predictable and unprecedented. Together, these two ideas explain how we will face a rush of extremes, all scientifically imaginable but utterly new to human experience.

We can think of nonlinear change as intensifying in irregular leaps and bounds rather than simply becoming different at a steady pace. As the climate warms, for example, high winds and hard rains become higher and harder while breezes and showers will remain much the same. Droughts as well as floods grow more severe because nonlinear change increases turbulence in the atmosphere.

This accelerated, turbulent change leads to “gray swan” events, defined as the predictable result of intensifying the conditions for life on Earth beyond anything our species has witnessed. A “white swan” in this metaphor is normal, and a “black swan” is unimaginable. The data can predict the storms on our Anthropocene horizon, but we’ve never seen them before.

Part of our dilemma is that as we breach planetary boundaries we tend to normalize both our behavior and its consequences. We’re trapped in lives that push these boundaries and limit our options to heal them. Plant and animal populations diminish or wink out of existence, and we hesitate to act. Megatons of artificial nitrogen and mined phosphorus poured onto industrial agriculture run off into choked waterways, and we hesitate to act. Hurricanes strengthen at lightning speed over warmer seas, and we hesitate to act.

One fundamental truth of the Anthropocene is that there is no place on Earth untouched, and no place to hide. There were once ecosystems where farms and bulldozers and fishing boats did not reach, but now the altered atmosphere warms and infiltrates all of life with its chemistry. The ocean thunders against the shore as it always has, though now the waves are warmer, less oxygenated, and more acidic.

But remember that a storm is always an opportunity. The chalkboard is being erased. Who we become amid the turbulence ahead will define both the scale of turbulence and the life that emerges from it.

One of the more complex truths of this time is that humans have long been a transformational species. On one hand, we seem uniquely responsible for ecological change and the extinction of many large animal species as far back as 50,000 years ago. On the other, Indigenous cultures across the globe have been responsibly managing vast regions of the Earth for millennia. We are fully capable of being the storm that brings life and builds resilience, but only if we proclaim and adhere to a set of ethics that reframe the management task ahead of us.

Those ethics should, at heart, be rooted in empathy for the living world, and a not-infrequent desire to be out in the wind, sun, and rain.

We are eight billion, heading for ten billion, and we are hungry for resources we do not need, yet we must find it within ourselves to diminish our harms and enrich the future fabric of life. We must, as I’ve written, return to being a keystone species that supports life rather than merely a headstone species writing epitaphs for the species we cared too little about.

This is a lot to salvage from a storm, I know, especially one that mainly impacted a small state in a wealthy country. More to the point, I don’t want to be trapped in a doom spiral of attribution science, or even of attribution ethics. Nor do I want you to be stuck thinking about what we’ve done every time the weather gets interesting. We need the joy and fear and clarity of weather against our skin and senses, and that’s okay.

In the end, a storm is a storm, even if it’s raining plastic. The Earth acts according to the forces that be, and we are now one of those forces.

The Anthropocene is a storm across deep time, a storm on an epochal scale that will leave its mark on the genetic and sedimentary history of this planet. The sooner we stop the sources of harm – whether heat, erasure, contamination – the sooner we improve those portions of our Earth management portfolio.

Whether the storm has our fingerprints on it, or whether a beautiful and powerful storm is as much crime as scene, is less important than how we prepare for it and how we manage our response to it. The future of storms is one more thing to manage, as is our ability to find joy, awe, beauty, and laughter amid the fear of weathering what’s to come.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

From Orion, “The Plan,” a brief and beautifully-written ode to the optimism in gardening, and to the reality checks a gardener faces when devising, over years, plans for how life will unfold:

How much of the pleasure of making a garden is in the plan? It is a collaboration with God—you plant your bulb, a prayer cased in tissue-thin skin, prone to rot, dropped into the damp earth, and then, months later, the prayer is miraculously fleshed forth in petals.

Time is what you garden, in the end. Plants come and go, but time continues.

From Reasons to be Cheerful, “The Native Seed Farm Safeguarding California’s Future,” an excellent article on Heritage Growers, a nonprofit farm with more than 200 acres dedicated to growing native plants. The farm meticulously harvests the seeds from those plants which are used in habitat restoration projects around the state. Everyone involved is planning years ahead for how and where to best use these seeds. One large project that’s benefited is the massive Klamath River dam removal and habitat restoration project spearheaded in part by the Yurok tribe.

From and Predirections, “The future is being stolen one small decision at a time,” a brief, thoughtful reflection on how short-term thinking underpins so much that is wrong with how global culture asks us to live on the Earth. Short election cycles and financial goals make us forget how to be good ancestors:

We imagine the future being lost in big, cinematic moments. Yes, there are wars that are started and there are leaders that are elected that change the course of history. But it’s mostly eroded in ways that are near invisible.

And once you start seeing these tiny losses, the questions become inevitable.

From Mother Jones, “The Battle Over Solar on Farmland,” an articulation of the two very different ways farmers view the growing phenomenon of agrivoltaics, as expressed by two farmers in Oregon. As I’ve noted here often, evidence mounts daily of the benefits, economic and often agricultural, when farmers incorporate solar in their fields where either grazing or growing take place. (Solar Saves Farms gathers information on those benefits.) But many farmers fear the loss of good growing soil to yet another corporate takeover.

From the Times, new research suggests that climate change has accelerated significantly over the last decade. Again and again, predictions for the rate of change and the arrival of consequences for the oceans and atmosphere have underestimated the speed of the transformation.

From the Guardian, an illustrated exploration of insect migration, focused on a few astonishing migration stories - including Painted Lady butterflies crossing the Atlantic and bogong moths in Australia navigating by the stars - to remind us that insect migration is far more common that we thought, and that insects are just as complex and amazing as the birds whose migrations we celebrate.

Also from the Guardian, “Mining’s Toxic Timebomb,” an overview of the long-term hazards of tailing ponds, i.e. “dams full of toxic waste,” that threaten massive environmental harm all over the world:

The impact of tailings dams on the environment can last for decades, often with disastrous consequences for nature. Heavy metals do not degrade over time and can evolve into many poisonous forms, accumulating up food chains, inhibiting plant growth and altering populations of soil microbes.

Prof Elaine Baker, a marine scientist at the University of Sydney who helped develop the first public database of mine-tailings dams around the world, says: “The way we do mining is still very similar to the Romans. We get a whole lot of waste and we dump it somewhere and we hope that it’s not going to hurt anybody.

From the Cornell Lab, a reminder of several ways you can help birds. I want to emphasize two here: Making windows bird-friendly with tools that make them visible to birds, and keeping your cats indoors. I’ve written in “Our Haunting Failure” about treating windows to protect birds, and will write one soon about cats.

Fancy a stroll? From the BBC, the new King Charles III England Coast Path is officially opened, linking 2,689 miles of coastal paths and allowing walkers to traverse nearly all of the English coastline. It is, apparently, the world’s longest coastal footpath, and took 18 years to complete.

Share

Hello everyone:

I’ve been writing quite a bit about the built world lately. This week, I clear my head on a slow walk through the real world, and return to what this writing is meant to honor.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

Here in the north country, the end of winter is coming. Daylight is a candle with a lengthening wick, and its warm light pulls back the deep blanket of snow to let the first green thoughts emerge. On the forest floor, microcosms of moss blink, then begin again the work of ages. The enduring hearts of what we call ephemerals - bloodroot, trillium, and trout lily among them - stir within the living soil, murmuring beneath the soft ticker tape of last year’s leaves. In fields, even before the husks of last summer’s grasses and flowers are fully revealed, snow-filtered light reignites the innumerable engines of the world beneath our feet.

Everywhere, life moves upward and outward like softly growing applause for the Sun.

The thermogenic miracle of skunk cabbage impatiently burns its way up through the snow. Nearby, the cryogenic miracles of wood frogs thaw and prepare to call softly from icy pools. Red-winged blackbirds and woodcocks, among the first to wing their way north, arrive to sing amid sun-warmed slush.

In the weeks ahead, hundreds of millions of warblers - each the weight of a few pennies - and other bold handfuls of feathers will trace Earth’s magnetic field through the starlit skies of North America, calling out to each other in what Bill Davison celebrates as “the ongoing murmur of a world you belong to.” No less ardent, and under rain that falls beneath the same stars, rarely seen salamanders will emerge to follow their damp passions on slow, epic, soundless half-mile plods from dark duff to vernal pool.

Mating, breeding, singing: Spring fulfills the promise that death makes to life, and awakens the promise that life makes to death. Our singing is part of a much larger song.

But for some of us, spring can come too soon. Winter offers clarity and joy as well as difficulty, if we’re lucky enough not to suffer too much. Cold, ice, snow, and darkness test the spirit and thin the herd, but it is also a time of profound beauty. With apologies, then, to those for whom spring cannot come soon enough, I’m here to offer an ode to winter in its time of passing.

Winter, I’ve long thought, teaches us the richness that comes with emptiness. Indoors, we treasure the light and warmth that shield us from the cold and dark. Outdoors, we find ourselves silhouetted like the trees and winter weeds against the blank wonder of snow, and so more easily feel the depth of our belonging.

This water that falls like feathers reorients the world, waits with us here above ground in a cold bright stillness that distills complexity into a map of silence. That silence around us provides fellowship for the silence within us.

I go out into winter to be emptied out and filled up. This is true of any walk in any season, I think, because people have evolved over uncounted generations to walk through forest and field, mountain and coastline, desert and wetland, and now cities, with minds that ease anxiety with movement. But winter intensifies that gift for me, makes it more elegant and distinct, as my boots plunge through snow with the focused simplicity of breath in, breath out.

It’s not a surprise, I suppose, that after spending much of my young adulthood bouncing between Maine and Antarctica, I feel at home in winter. But that decade in Antarctica’s permanent winter was lit by a 24-hour summer sun, and so I have to confess to preferring my cold-weather walking meditations to be well-lit. To no avail. A Maine winter forces us to be our own candles in the darkness.

In one sense, I don’t mind the long hours of night: I’m a recalcitrant night owl, and so the flood of darkness allows more owlish behavior. But come December, the days begin to feel as ephemeral as a blossoming starflower. If I sleep in - and I do - I miss out.

My favorite walks this winter - always in the dusk of late afternoon - have been a handful of mile-long bushwhacking trudges from the house here. I pass through a drift-filled forest, around an alder swamp, across the ice of a bog laced with otter trails, then along a cheerful little outlet stream before it broadens into a large wetland with a massive beaver lodge in a pond whose dead trees host a dozen great blue heron nests.

The deep snow and the necklace of frozen wetlands remind me that winter is a revelation about the physics behind biology. Flora and fauna are only characters in the story of a planet spinning and tilting in its orbit. Water, vapor, snow, ice: The fate of water, in this story of flux and flow, defines the fate of its characters. I’ve always felt that following a stream is a profound narrative, because it is both ordinary and a path to joy. And a winter following feels more profound, in part because the starkness of winter lays bare the bones of reality, and in part because I get to walk on water.

The beaver/heron pond lies at the bottom of a large and noble sloping field, surrounded by undeveloped forest and overseen by an old neglected farmhouse perched atop the hill. An old colonial road, now a forest path, runs nearby. There’s an island of pine, maple, and birch in the lower field, standing tall in what was recently a thick blanket of snow.

As spring awakens and throws aside winter’s white quilt, the field is moist and golden in the light. Frost in the earth breaks, softens, then melts into groundwater. The feathers of snow dissolve to wet and whet the appetites of soil, and the field’s albedo shifts from the sharp reflections of winter to the warm embrace of spring.

I love walking, skiing, and snowshoeing through forest, keeping company with trees and seeing in the snow-reflected light the extraordinary elegance of lichens mapped onto their trunks. I love how a winter forest provides step-by-step evidence of the paths of other lives - deer, coyote, turkey, squirrel, porcupine, bobcat, otter, fisher, and so many others - and how our tracks are woven into theirs. I love tracing and crossing streams, and walking across the ice of usually impassable bogs and swamps.

I love how the dance of life and death play out in a winter forest, how the elegant dark bones of trees and shrubs shape the northern story of survival, rising out of the white starkness to feed the birds and acknowledge the Sun. Their buds, in place since the fall, were built on last summer’s light and are dedicated to the light that’s coming. That’s a message of endurance we would all do well to heed.

But it’s the winter fields that I keep coming back to. There’s nothing like emerging out of the dendritic forest landscape - trees and shrubs sending their woody arteries and capillaries toward the sky - into the wide open simplicity of a snowy field. Perhaps it’s the ancient human desire for a clear view over the savanna. Perhaps it’s the part of me that fell in love with the vast emptiness of Antarctica, where I found the astonishing nature behind nature’s green curtain. Or perhaps it’s my attachment to the promise of a blank page, knowing that winter’s harshness will always give way to the beautiful complexity of life.

Here in Maine, where a field always wants to be forest, an old farm field is both the footprint of destruction - trees felled or burned, perhaps a century or more ago - and a resilient constellation of life. No longer pasture, but still mowed every year or so, the field I’ve made my short pilgrimages to this winter is a beautiful artifact. Beneath the snow is an intricate tangle of last year’s grasses, sedges, and flowers. At our previous home, Heather and I documented 93 flowering plants in a similar but smaller field. The more details of life we saw in that field, the more we realized we weren’t seeing, and would never see. A field is a tattered scrap of fabric that speaks to the wholecloth that contains us all.

A winter field, then, is both blank page and a message about what comes next. Revelation is guaranteed - that’s the nature of sunlight - but what is revealed depends entirely on our willingness to look, and to see, and to act in a way that best serves the artifact we have made of the Earth.

So, yes, the end of winter is coming, and coming quickly. I don’t dread it as much as Heather does, but spring brings the to-do lists of garden and yard, the prospect of summer heat, and the new ubiquity of disease-bearing ticks, who have completely changed how we relate to the good green world. Heather’s perfect year would consist mostly of fall and winter, with a palate cleanser of spring and just a brief taste of summer. Her latest post at her notebook of nature songs, , offers her own beautiful ode to winter, “Cradled in the Quiet.”

And that reminds me of the last thing I should say about my passage through winter into spring. I am incredibly lucky to share that passage with a friend who happens to be my beautiful wife, and who is more devoted than me to being out in field and forest to see what needs to be seen, and to share what needs to be shared. Heather maps the lichen and counts the flowers; she tracks the bobcat and coyote and kneels before the deer bed to find signs of the fawn; and she shares what she learns with whoever she can.

She is her own candle, and I’m fortunate to live in its light.

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

As cited above, a wonderful photoessay from and Easy By Nature, “Stars Talking to Stars,” about how awareness of bird migration leads to greater awareness of what life is and what life needs. Bill’s writing just keeps getting more beautiful:

Dissolution is not death; it is flight. We are called to join a river of awakening.

We are drowning in information but starving for awareness.

From Chloe Hope and Death & Birds, “Untangling,” yet another incredibly beautiful short personal essay about, yes, death and birds, but really about all that is most real about being alive. Read this essay, see the photo at its end of the kinship between her young self and a Harris hawk, then subscribe to read everything else Chloe has written.

From and In the Garden of His Imagination, “Warm, Their Gathered Light,” a beautiful short photo-ode to swamp lanterns, Western relatives to both skunk cabbage and jack-in-the-pulpits:

Deep in the piney woods of late, in places low and damp, mysterious light gatherers swell and grow, reaching bravely upward, voiceless and steady, collecting fuel: raindrops, and fog dew, sunbeams and moonbeams, cloud glow and wisps of light from every imagining, even occasionally, stray bits from an early spring rainbow.

From Aeon, a sweet and very short animated video by Aboriginal Australian artist Betty Conway, illustrating the joys of a family after rain arrives in the dry landscape of the Northern Territory.

From the Times, the Nature Record, a massive nearly-900-page report on the state of nature in the U.S., was nearing publication when the Trump administration axed it. Nonetheless, the large team of scientists persisted, and have now released a draft. The story it tells is similar to the story of its release: grim, but dotted with hope:

Many of the preliminary findings are grim: Freshwater ecosystems across the country are in crisis, “overdrawn, polluted, fragmented and invaded.” Marine and terrestrial ecosystems are degraded, with reduced biodiversity. An estimated 34 percent of plant species and 40 percent of animal species are at risk of extinction.

Human pressures on nature are eroding the necessities it gives us, such as clean water, food, health, livelihoods and protection from storms and fire. But there is hope, and the authors emphasized the ability to chart a new course.

“The future is not fixed,” said Phillip Levin, who directed the assessment both under the government and since. “Conservation, restoration and renewed connections between people and nature can improve ecosystem health and strengthen community resilience.”

From Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an eye-opening long-form article on what’s really been happening in Japan to the communities poisoned by the Fukushima nuclear disaster 15 years ago. The government claims progress and clean-up where the citizens document a much more difficult reality.

Some of Japan’s efforts to revive the area have been successful. Other measures have created injustices and stigma. The lived experience of people resettling the evacuation zone reveals an ongoing disaster at Fukushima—a disaster that is not well known in Japan or the rest of the world.

From The Conversation, an explainer essay by one of the researchers behind a new study that found that worsening bird species’ losses in North America are associated with intensive agriculture:

Modern agriculture transforms landscapes. Large cropland areas replace diverse habitats. Herbicides and pesticides used on farms reduce weeds and insects that many bird species depend on for food. Heavy machinery and reduced habitat diversity can limit nesting opportunities.

Here’s another of my frequent reminders for you to consider subscribing to both The Weekly Anthropocene from and Global Nature Beat from . Both Sam and Mike provide extraordinary resources, having cast very wide nets for news on the research and politics of biodiversity (Mike) and positive energy and wildlife stories (Sam). Sam’s latest is here, and Mike’s is here.

From Quartz, the recycling industry is betting heavily on the ability of machine learning (i.s. “AI”) to make the recycling of everything from electronics to clothing more manageable and profitable. So much material is wasted because it’s difficult to sort and process. It is possible that one of the benefits of “AI” is a cleaner, more rational, waste management system. We’ll see.

From Reasons to be Cheerful and NPR, two updates on the exciting prospect of plug-in solar (a.k.a. balcony solar) here in the U.S. Plug-in solar is a plug-and-play device consisting of a small solar array that you simply set up and plug into your house. Nor permits necessary, and it typically pays for itself in a couple years as it cuts a sizeable amount of your electricity bill every month. Already very popular in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, so far only Utah has passed legislation allowing it, but 28 states have bills in the queue. Reasons to be Cheerful provides an overview, and NPR reports on utility efforts to slow the roll-out.

Share

Hello everyone:

I begin this week talking about the war in Iran and the depredations of the fossil fuel industry, but stick with me: The writing leads to a fascinating proposal for helping to force that industry, finally, into the dustbin of history.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

The war against Iran reminds us of so much that ails us at this moment in history. By “us”, I mean both Americans specifically and humans more broadly. And by “this moment in history,” I mean both the current U.S. administration with its extraordinary corruption (financial, anti-democratic, moral) and modern civilization’s rapid transformation of conditions for life on Earth. The heat and erasures of modern war are, after all, a reflection of the heat and erasures of the Anthropocene. We burn what we should love.

“The major problems in the world,” Gregory Bateson reminded us, “are the result of the differences between how nature works and the way people think.”

I make no claim to a clear understanding of why this war, why now, and what happens next. It may be a convenient merging of Sunni vs. Shia violence, Israeli hard-line geopolitics, and some half-witted Armageddon-seeking religious extremism from Christian nationalists in the U.S. military. But scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder makes some compelling arguments and asks some crucial questions about the facts of America in this moment. “These facts,” he writes, “suggest two interpretive frameworks: a foreign war as a mechanism to destroy democracy at home; and a foreign war as an element of personal corruption by the president of the United States.” There’s too much to unpack there, so I’ll focus on just one element, and a possible long-term solution that is probably not on your radar.

Though he doesn’t mention it, Snyder’s frameworks include in their logic the dark motivations of the fossil fuel industry. The very public pay-to-play corruption of the Trump administration includes a deal to do that industry’s bidding after receiving tens of millions of dollars in campaign funds (or perhaps much more, in the dark money reality of U.S. politics). That’s why the last year has been full of new tax breaks for oil and gas companies, overturned pollution regulations, incentives for more drilling, and an obstacle course of executive orders against the (inevitable) clean energy revolution.

Modern democracy, representing people’s desire to shift rapidly to cleaner energy sources, is no longer good for the oil and gas industry’s bottom line.

Of course, fossil fuels have always been more of a logistical than moral good. War and oil have been inextricably linked from the beginning of this fossil-fueled era. As 20th century societies powered up on coal and oil, so did militaries. As fossil fuel resources became invaluable, conflicts became inevitable. Too often, national governments merged with their industry into petrostates, perverting democratic interests into oil-stained profits.

But national strength, coalescing around a critical resource, became fragility on the world stage. The “structural vulnerability” of a world reliant on “a system tied to a volatile, conflict-driven industry” is as obvious today, with Tehran in flames, as it was when oil powered the global horrors of the first and second world wars. Lord Curzon, British war minister during WWI, wrote that the Allies “floated to victory on a wave of oil.” The Lord did not mention all the life that drowned beneath that wave.

Reflecting on today’s conflict with Iran, scientist James Gleick said this week, via Mastodon, that

The world is getting a reminder, once again, of the enormous economic and geopolitical risks associated with dependence on fossil fuels. And a reminder of the incredible independence that renewable energy provides from those risks.

And here’s a quick and effective video explainer from scientist Chris Gloninger that nicely mocks the idea that solar and wind are somehow more unreliable sources of energy than oil and gas. (Thanks to for the link.) Sun and wind cannot be embargoed, and thousands of solar panels are much harder to bomb than a single large refinery. Crucially, renewable energy sources don’t have a supply chain that’s vulnerable to disturbances at any time and any place on Earth. They derive their power locally, rather than from oil and gas fields on other continents and from tankers navigating a conflict-ridden world.

And then there’s the bottom line. Solar, in particular, is now radically cheaper and more efficient than fossil fuels. As the International Energy Agency (IEA) wrote in a 2024 report,

For comparison, a single journey by a large container ship filled with solar PV modules can provide the means to produce as much electricity as would be generated from the natural gas onboard more than 50 large liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers, or from coal onboard 100 large ships.

You probably already know much of this, or at least the general idea that fossil fuels are as dangerous and outdated now as their industry is powerful, bloated, and corrupt. You know that we must, as has been saying for years, stop burning things. You know that just as we need a ceasefire in all these oil-driven wars, we need to cease fire…

But in a political era driven by the forces who oppose both of those ceasefires, the task seems Herculean. The good news is that the economics of solar, wind, and batteries are writing the obituary for fossil fuels on a faster timeline than most people realize, though it’s still not fast enough. What intrigues me, then, is another idea that could accelerate the transition with political leverage: The Fossil Fuel Treaty (FFT).

The FFT was originally the FFNPT, with NP for Non-Proliferation, because the treaty idea finds its inspiration in nuclear arms non-proliferation treaties signed by otherwise intractable Cold War foes. The idea is to create a binding agreement to phase out fossil fuel use in as quick and fair manner as possible. Its three principles are

Just Transition - Accelerate a fair shift to diversified, accessible, renewable energy

Non-Proliferation - create the conditions to ensure the end of the expansion of oil, gas and coal

Equitable Phase Out - Wind down existing fossil fuels to safe levels with wealthy countries leading and supporting others to join

I first bumped into the idea of the fossil fuel treaty a year and a half ago in a DeSmog interview with Canadian environmentalist Tzeporah Berman. I’ve been meaning to investigate it ever since, and now that we’ve crossed the light crude Rubicon in Iran, this seems like a good time. When asked why a treaty might be a solution to the fossil fuel problem, Berman said “I would say this is a moment in history where we need bold new ideas. This is a bold new idea, and we can’t afford to not try it.”

Already, according to the Fossil Fuel Treaty site, a bloc of 18 countries has begun discussions, and they are

backed by a growing network including over 4,200 civil society organisations, more than 146 sub-national governments, 800+ parliamentarians, 101 Nobel Laureates, 3,000 scientists and more than 1 million individuals.

That network includes the World Health Organization, the European Parliament, members of the Vatican’s Holy See, governments and organizations across the Pacific region, the states of California and Hawaii, and cities across the globe from London and Paris to Wellington (NZ) and Sydney (AUS), from Portland (Maine) to Lilongwe (Malawi).

And things are happening. The first Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels will be held at the end of April, in the coal export city of Santa Marta, Colombia. (The Netherlands are co-hosting with Colombia.) The conference builds on two recent proclamations: The first is an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice that governments are legally required to address climate change, and the second is the Belém Declaration on the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels, a non-binding statement produced at COP30 and endorsed by 24 nations.

The Belém Declaration grew out of many years of frustration with the slow, industry-weakened COP process. Unlike every COP document to appear so far, the Declaration unabashedly names fossil fuels as the primary driver of climate change and pushes for faster, science-based action to shape global policy around the goals of the Paris Agreement.

The FFT conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels will work mostly outside the UN process to build a global coalition and create a set of agreements that can then act as leverage on the larger stage where, for now, industry and petrostates hold power. It’s modeled on a variety of international conferences held to face up to global threats from what Berman calls “intransigent products.” On the environmental side, an incredibly successful example is the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting chemicals. On the geopolitical side, there are the first nuclear arms treaties, as I noted above, and the Ottawa Conference to address land mines and the Oslo Conference on cluster munitions.

Some nations (notably Russia and the U.S.) never signed those latter treaties, but the agreements have had an enormous impact nonetheless on the majority of nations which put human rights and social justice ahead of military-industrial profits. A similar outcome seems likely for the FFT.

It’s helpful to see the FFT as an attempt to control the supply-side of the fossil fuel problem. The story of our civilization wrestling with a catastrophically dangerous energy source is so far a demand-side story. Users of fossil fuels, whether nations or families, are switching to cleaner, cheaper sources of energy. That side of the equation, as the picture below demonstrates, has advanced rapidly, but developing economies require more and more energy, wherever they can find it.

Meanwhile, the suppliers are doing all they can to increase production, prolong the use of fossil fuels as long as possible, and avoid legal or moral responsibility for the immense harm they continue to wreak on all of life on Earth. As a result, fossil fuel use has continued to increase. Its peak, and then decline, are close, but it’s decades later than it should be.

It is tempting, given the extraordinary growth in clean, affordable, energy sources - solar and batteries in particular, but also wind, geothermal, and more - to let the market do its work. Surely, fossil fuels will die quickly under the weight of their higher costs, fragile supply lines, and shrinking demand? On a level playing field, perhaps. But the global industry has floated to economic victory over the last century on a wave of subsidies. As Tzeporah Berman noted in her interview,

the markets aren’t constraining production, because the markets are distorted by the $7-8 trillion the IMF says were given in fossil fuel subsidies last year; that’s $13 million a minute. These are the most powerful companies on Earth, and most profitable companies on Earth, and they continue to hold influence so that they can grow and expand their products.

Of that $7-8 trillion, $1.5 trillion is in explicit subsidies and the rest is an estimate of the costs to society (health and environmental) for which the industry is not held to account. Of course, here in the U.S., the Trump administration has increased subsidies to the industry by $3.5 billion per year (on top of the existing $31 billion) in its recent budget bill, and Republicans in Congress are working to provide legal immunity for the industry as it faces a landslide of lawsuits seeking some of the money it owes for those impacts to human health, the climate, and the environment.

This is a reminder that the Fossil Fuel Treaty isn’t simply looking to limit the climate impacts of coal, oil, and gas. A treaty that forced a phase-out of fossil fuels would also free up those funds wasted on subsidies, reduce the millions of premature deaths each year from related pollution, ease the many catastrophic impacts on planetary boundaries specific to fossil fuels, and provide energy independence for the many nations able to source their own power from clean, local sources.

Treaties like this are enormously complicated, even without pushback from some of the largest economic forces in the world, because they require the constraint of an economic activity. Leaving trillions of dollars of oil and gas in the ground does not come easily in a world ruled by human weakness.

Yet the FFT is further complicated by the prospect of negotiating a fossil fuel phase-out between nations both rich and poor. Unlike, say, ozone-eating chemicals produced by a handful of companies, or nuclear weapons developed by a few governments, fossil fuels are woven into the daily lives of everyone on Earth. Eliminating subsidies for (and raising taxes on) the fossil fuel trade will make these energy sources more expensive, which for poorer communities will do more harm than good. It can be done fairly, but it may be a very fraught process.

And those are just some of the political and economic elements. A Volts podcast that just dropped this week, “The fate of the fossil fuel system - in the mid-transition,” provides really fascinating insights into how we might get through the strange and difficult energy transition phase in which the rise of renewables and the decline of fossil fuels must play well together in the energy and economic landscapes. The world has been tied together by those fragile oil/gas/coal supply chains, and now they have to be untied, unbuilt, and reimagined. As Volts host says in his intro, we’re used to imagining a world powered by clean energy, but tend not to imagine what the halfway point looks like:

In the energy forecasting models, the fossil fuel systems gradually decline as the clean systems gradually grow to replace them — one line goes smoothly down as the other goes smoothly up. But as we know from … everything that’s ever happened, lines do not move smoothly in real life. What’s going to happen to those fossil fuel systems as they shrink? Are they going to phase out in a way that is economically rational or equitable? Are they going to hand off to the systems that replace them in a way that preserves reliability and safety?

Berman says that, broadly, the FFT process includes an agreement 1) to stop expanding fossil fuel production, 2) to wind down production while deciding “who gets to produce, and how much,” and 3) “to fast track the Just Transition.” There is a library to be written about what’s involved, in detail, for each of these steps, but some sources include Fossil Fuel Exit Strategy, a 2021 booklet from the Australian Institute for Sustainable Futures; two good Wikipedia pages on the FFT and the fossil fuel phase-out; and of course the Fossil Fuel Treaty site, where the FAQ page may be a good starting point.

Without the built-in weaknesses of the UN process - petrostate veto power, thousands of industry lobbyists, etc. - a treaty process could be relatively quick. From this April’s conference, treaty negotiations may be only a few years off. The broad coalition of people, organizations, and nations behind the FFT initiative are cautiously optimistic, it seems:

History proves that achieving a Fossil Fuel Treaty is possible. From landmines to ozone depleting chemicals - politics, economics and social norms can change when a group of first mover political leaders and countries, spurred on by civil society and ordinary people, decide to look at threats to humanity for what they are - and do something about it.

And I keep coming back to the demand-side of the equation, which is so much further along than most people realize. The flood of affordable Chinese solar panels across the globe, and the irrepressible rise of clean energy production and installation by countries large and small, represent a transition unlike any in human history. It’s societies powering up, but far faster than the rise of fossil fuels, and with far more care for a universal quality of life.

The incredible surge of small-scale solar installation in Pakistan, which now makes up much of the available energy in the country, has become well-known. But a recent report from Ember highlights a similar surge beginning across Africa, as the image above makes clear. And the economics of the transition are obvious. In Nigeria, for example, a solar panel can be paid off with just six months of not paying for diesel fuel. There’s no going back.

Which makes me think that, given these economics of renewables even in the face of trillions of dollars in oil and gas subsidies, it may be that the FFT won’t have to become a powerful international lever anchored by most of the world’s wealthiest countries fighting their own entrenched interests. It may only need to be another large nail in the coffin of an industry finally, finally, facing up to its poisoning of human and environmental health, its moral failings, and an economic reckoning both in the open market and in the courts that bring it to heel.

I’ll close by looking at all this from the outside. And by “outside,” I mean the real world, where life is. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, made up of organizations in 160 countries (including many government conservation agencies and environmental groups like The National Audubon Society, The Center for Biological Diversity, and The Nature Conservancy) is now part of the FFT coalition. In response, an environment minister for Vanuatu, an island nation deeply threatened by a hotter world, praised them for finally waking up:

For the first time, the IUCN has recognised what science has been telling us for decades: we cannot protect nature while expanding fossil fuels.

And finally, the Fossil Fuel Treaty, whether it succeeds or not, seems like an abstraction in a world of earthly woes, but Berman makes a case for it as an act of love. Love, she learned in an epiphany moment while talking with an Indigenous elder in the Ecuadorian Amazon, is one of the three principles of true wealth. The elder had recently acquired a computer, Wi-Fi, and a solar panel, and had been investigating our culture. He was perplexed by our insistence on wealth as paper and coin. “We define wealth,” he told her, “as love, a strong community, and a healthy forest that brings us our air and water and food and medicine.”

That, to me, seems like a lesson in bringing together the way people think with how nature works.

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

From DarkSky.org, an opportunity (before March 9th) to speak out against two insane proposals to fill the sky with (even more) satellites that Earth’s orbit and atmosphere simply cannot sustain. The FCC is reviewing two proposals, one from Reflect Orbital and the other from SpaceX, and they’re taking public comments now. The DarkSky page has very specific instructions for what is a not-so-simple comment process, so read it carefully. As far as the problems with the proposals, the gist is this: Reflect Orbital wants to launch a vast host of satellites that will reflect sunlight back to Earth as a way to profit from providing 24-hr solar power and illuminating cities. That’s a ridiculous boondoggle. SpaceX, meanwhile, wants to launch up to a million satellites as “orbital data centers” to house a globe-encircling artificial intelligence network. That’s extraordinarily dumb and dangerous. There’s too much wrong about both these proposals to describe here, but you can read my piece “The Sky is Falling” for the atmospheric consequences of the existing satellite problem.

From the Revelator, the recovery of the Klamath basin after three major dams were removed has been nothing less than extraordinary. In part, this is owed to years of thoughtful preparation and years of hard work by Yurok and state agencies to restore native vegetation to the areas exposed by dam removal. And in part, it’s owed to the salmon, who arrived just days after the dams came down. As one state environmental program manager put it:

The speed at which salmon are repopulating every nook and cranny of suitable habitat upstream of the dams in the Klamath Basin is both remarkable and thrilling.

From and Weathering Climate Change, “The Earth is Getting Darker and Almost Nobody is Talking About It,” a fascinating and concise description of the Anthropocene change in Earth’s albedo - the amount of sunlight that Earth reflects back into space - and the dramatic consequences ahead. Measuring the change in albedo is very accurate way of assessing how we’re heating the planet, namely by measuring the difference between the amount of solar energy arriving in the atmosphere and the amount reflected back out. Gloninger explores and explains three processes behind the change in albedo - ice loss, cloud cover, and aerosol production - and why the amount of change (0.6% over 22 years) is incredibly important but very difficult for us to care about:

Part of the problem is that albedo is abstract. You can’t feel it. You can’t see it. There’s no albedo equivalent of a category 5 hurricane or a wildfire consuming a city. It shows up as a line on a graph in a NASA database, and that line doesn’t make for viral content.

But it should. Because that line represents the planet’s thermostat breaking, in slow motion, in real time, measured with satellite precision.

From the New Yorker, “The Hidden History of Native American Enslavement,” an eye-opening introduction to a long-ignored topic. For centuries, beginning with the earliest days of Spanish colonization, millions of Indigenous people were forced into various forms of bondage, in a history that should be woven into our limited understanding of slavery in the Americas. The article largely serves as an introduction to the monumental Native Bound Unbound project, a digital initiative

that recovers and connects every documented instance of Indigenous slavery across the Americas—through archival documents, art, artifacts, and architecture. The project seeks to illuminate where it took place, when it occurred, whom it impacted, and the profound meaning embedded in its legacy for both Indigenous communities and the descendants of the enslaved.

From High Country News, it’s getting to be amphibian-saving season again here in the north country. In Oregon, human “frog taxis” are busy moving red-legged frogs across a four-lane highway so they can safely breed.

From Yale e360, the “right to repair” movement in Europe is about to get a huge boost from the implementation of the EU’s new Right to Repair Directive. Already, there are around 1800 “repair cafes” in Germany alone, in which volunteers help citizens patch up whatever they can bring in: electronics, lamps, clothing, appliances, furniture, and more. Now, according to the directive,

manufacturers of many household appliances will be required to provide faster and more affordable repairs. They must offer spare parts and tools at reasonable prices to anyone who wants to repair a product, throughout its entire average lifespan. If a product needs repairs within two years of its purchase, its warranty will be extended by one year; if a defunct item cannot be repaired, consumers will get the choice of a refurbished second-hand product.

From Quanta, “The Quantum Mechanics of Greenhouse Gases,” a really well-illustrated explainer of the question too few of us (including me) have asked: How, exactly, does the tiny amount of CO2 in the atmosphere actually act as a very powerful temperature regulator for the Earth?

From the Guardian, a new study finds that the now-chronic excessive heating of the ocean is leading to “staggering” loss of marine life.

“To put it simply, the faster the ocean floor warms, the faster we lose fish,” said Shahar Chaikin, a marine ecologist at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Spain and the study’s lead author.

Share

If you’re new here, I recommend you read last week’s first half of this essay on empathy. It’s short, and lays out the Why and the How of the writing. There’s a creative frame - a countdown - that weaves together the different sections, from an Antarctic shipwreck to a bat hospital and a bed of moss. Last week covered 10 through 6, and this week offers 5 down to 1, each indicated in the section’s opening word. This week’s sections refer back, in small ways, to last week.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

50% of humanity - over four billion people - holds just 2% of global wealth. The wealthiest 0.001% - around 56,000 people - own three times as much. The richest 1% possess half of all wealth, and control the flow of much of the rest. There is a lot of nuance to be explored in the causes and effects of such inequality, but I’m fond of Cory Doctorow’s blunt description: “the only way to become a billionaire is to hurt and exploit lots of people.”

He was speaking more about tech bros and industrialists than entertainers, certainly, but the hoarding of vast wealth is by definition a form of violence against those whose health and wealth are depleted by their actions. And it’s a moral failure in a world forced by deliberate inequality to choose, again and again, to sacrifice our neighbors and the land to constant abuse.

Look no further than the pandemic when, as Oxfam documented, the wealth of the world’s ten richest men doubled in the first year and a half, as millions died. Around that time, they also noted, the wealthiest 252 men had more wealth than all of the billion women living in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

Let’s take as a symbol of this society-killing class the fascist, misogynist, and white supremacist ultra-billionaire Elon Musk, who spouted recently that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” He is already “worth” more than the GDP of most nations, and if not brought to heel seems likely to become the world’s first trillionaire while guiding us deeper into dystopian inequality and environmental destruction.

And yet does anyone doubt he is absolutely the wrong person for the job of directing the fate of life on Earth? Can we imagine him reclining in moss to appreciate the exchange of ecological gifts, or funding wildlife rescue centers? This is one of the men who led the destruction of USAID and who is now, as a Science editorial described it, “walking on the bodies of dead children,” having “yanked their food and medicine away while telling lies and cracking stupid jokes.”

Men like Musk embrace values drained of empathy. They have neither Shackleton’s sense of duty and obligation, nor a caregiver’s capacity to offer consideration to any bird or immigrant outside their small walled circles. My sense is that critics of empathy live in fear of the intimacy that binds all of life together, and so tend to value abstractions that they can imbue with their own self-serving meaning - flags and power, whiteness and corporations - rather than serve the tangibly human and beautifully more-than-human. They are, in a word, aliens.

Therefore cruelty, in a world of their fearful making, is everywhere.

Four hundred thousand people have been deported from the U.S. by ICE since the second Trump administration took power, according to the Guardian. At this moment, around 70,000 people are in ICE detention, 25,000 of whom have no criminal record. All of this, along with the administration’s surge of funds and personnel into ICE, is occurring in addition to the usual deportations from Customs and Border Protection.

Only the surge is new, though, not the habit. In the last months of the Biden administration, ICE and CBP were arresting more than 20,000 people per month and holding in detention an average of 40,000.

Trump’s surge has nearly doubled those numbers, in part by criminalizing those who are not criminals. It’s a normalizing of cruelty rooted in racism and nationalism, and must be confronted and stopped by the vast bulk of the population - that’s you and me - which retains the empathy necessary to sustain a healthy society, but remember that Trump’s people did not invent this. They have only intensified it, as powers-that-be do elsewhere around the world and have done throughout history.

Empathy is an antidote. It is a task, a to-do list, and a responsibility in a world too often driven by fear, hunger for power, and other blind ambitions. Billions of people have far too little, as far too few possess far too much. This extends far beyond the limits of humanity. Many wildlife populations around the globe have declined by an average of 70%, as we hoard vast resources for ourselves. Trillions of animals die to feed us every year.

Empathy, in the face of all this, is the necessary intervention. Every day.

38,693 college undergraduates in the U.S. offer some hope, according to recent research. It’s a cheerful update to data between 1979 and 2009 which showed a 40% decline in empathy and a marked increase in narcissism and individualism. The new data, since 2009, suggest that empathy in young adults has returned nearly to 1970s levels. I’m heartened in part because that era - the 70s - was a truly remarkable period in environmental activism.

That said, I’m not sure how seriously to take these findings, or what they might mean in an upside-down world, but I’ll put them in my pocket alongside all the other good news that trickles in every day, if we’re paying attention. Because, of course, empathy is all around us, even as the darker forces of human weakness take the reins amid the race to solve our other ongoing crises.

Two voices, among so many, on the Why of empathy as fundamental to the meaning of our personal and social lives: First, Maria Popova on the improbable happenstance of our physical and conscious existence. We are each, she says, a “handful of unchosen stardust on short-term loan from the universe,” and so find our footing not in the transience of self but in its broadening through love. Love is the expansion of self through empathy for others. Or as she puts it,

There is no reason for you to be here, to be you. But perhaps what is left in the wake of reason is love — the matter, the substance of us that over and over outweighs the antimatter of chance to make life tremble with aliveness.

If you’re not sure that love (in its fullest definition) and empathy are synonymous, remember Robin Wall Kimmerer’s elegant phrasing in Braiding Sweetgrass: “All flourishing is mutual.” When others in our circle of empathy do well, so do we. Widening the circle increases the flourishing. Widening the circle to the more-than-human, when love is conceived of as a constant exchange of gifts between us, and between us and the community of life, we walk a path toward deeper meaning and greater likelihood of survival. In an Orion interview, “Gift Thinking,” about her book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, she says:

My well-being is tied to yours and yours to mine. It develops a trust that when I am in need, there will be abundance shared with me. The giver and the recipient are honored at the same time. That seems a lot like love to me.

One day, I like to think, we’ll look back on all this from a greener world and gentler civilization. We’ll look back with clear eyes across the years - and across the ash and wreckage of this crucible in both human history and Earth history - to name the fatal flaws in the system built by the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

These flaws include the delusions that owning the land is more natural than living within its community, that the human mind is superior to the genius of life, that the artificial intelligences we call corporations should guide rather than serve us, that the fiction we call economics somehow supersedes the physics of ecology, that setting the world on fire was a necessary evil, and that the cruelty of power is more inevitable than the dignity of existence.

When I say “look back with clear eyes across the years,” I include the many years which still lie ahead of us, when far more ash and wreckage will pile up before we can return to living cheerfully within our planetary means. How many years that will be is unknown, but the shape and duration of it is up to us - the “us” of now and the “us” of the next generations - as we mend those flaws and tend to their consequences.

I have no clear vision of the future, other than the difficulty of it. It seems likely that there will be an outsized shock as some changes arrive hard and fast in a hotter world. But I think that, eventually, billions of good people will invest themselves into doing the good work to mend the flaws. Many already are, as you know. But it’s not yet enough. Not yet.

And I am confident that the “we” of the future will not be looking back and blaming the catastrophes on an excess of empathy.

Finally, I’ll close this week with two thoughts on empathy that have popped up in my reading during the interim between last week’s publication and this one. I include them not merely because of the value of their insights, but as a reminder that these truths about empathy are far more prevalent in our private lives than in the public and dystopian effort to demean them. Good ideas, like good people, are everywhere.

The first, from the notebooks of poet Charles Simic (who I wrote about a couple weeks ago), is a necessary reminder that our best selves arrive through actions rather than words:

The kindness of one human being to another in times of mass hatred and violence deserves more respect than the preaching of all the churches since the beginning of time.

The second, from a piece by in between two seas titled “the boys club,” a brilliant and excoriating personal essay, finds the light that is as woven through culture as the darkness of misogyny and suppression of women by emotionally-stunted men:

The light is in the billions of empathetic humans on this planet, the countless mothers and fathers teaching their kids—girls and boys—how to be empathetic human beings, the countless white men who see how destructive this system is and want to fight it too. And the light is in every act of empathy, every act of care, every person treated kindly, every offer of warmth and comfort, every child kept safe, every cry of pain—whether human or animal—that is believed without question, without the suppression of the instinctive knowledge of shared origin, shared feeling.

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

From bioGraphic, “The Ghosts of Conservation Past,” an excellent comprehensive history of U.S. conservation and its influence on conservation around the world.

From in Nature Briefs, the best discussion I’ve found of the pros and cons regarding “forest thinning” as a management tool for forest fire prevention. Is it a lifesaving strategy for returning forests to conditions that are resilient in a hotter world and safer for human communities? Or is it just haphazard commercial logging by another name and yet another crushing blow to forest biodiversity? The answer, it seems, is all of the above. Or, really, that it depends on the specifics of each forest and each logging operation. Research suggests that current advocacy for thinning is too often motivated by policymakers and commercial interests who want to promise a quick solution. Butler’s assessment is rooted in recent research published in Biological Conservation; two authors of that study also discuss it in the latest edition of The Revelator.

Another from Butler and Nature Briefs, “The Amazon’s most valuable export isn’t timber - it’s rain,” a thoughtful commentary on recent research that tries to quantify how important rainforests are to Earth’s circulation of water, and thus to our economies:

Rainfall is often treated as a gift of geography — a function of latitude, oceans, and atmospheric circulation. A growing body of research suggests that in the tropics, it is also a product of ecosystems. Forests do not merely receive rain. They help generate it, regulate its distribution, and sustain the conditions that allow it to persist.

From and Letters from an American, an excellent breakdown of the politics and environmental consequences of the disastrous proposal to open up land around the Boundary Waters wilderness in Minnesota to a copper/iron mine. She lays out the ominous tactics in Congress, which if normalized could gut any environmental regulation for a generation, but the detail that got my attention was that the billionaire owner of the Chilean mining giant behind this proposal had purchased a mansion in D.C. during the first Trump administration and then rented it out to Trump’s family.

From Mother Jones, a recommendation for anyone exhausted by dystopian fiction (and dystopian reality) to start reading solarpunk literature, a genre which acknowledges that the future of life on Earth is being written by the Anthropocene but which imagines what we can do right as the chaos sets in. Unlike the depressing cyberpunk narratives of Blade Runner and the Hunger Games, etc., these solarpunk books suggest that despite our failings and weaknesses, humans can rise to the challenge and create a future that we “might actually want to live in.”

From Quanta, climate physicists wrestle with clouds, struggling to model them in a way that will make climate models much more accurate. As much as I want these models to be more accurate, I must confess (as a long-time cloud lover) to a hope that clouds keep their ethereal mystery forever.

From High Country News, a warming world is bad for skiing. Snowmaking is increasing, but to what effect and at what cost?

From Literary Hub, a fascinating excerpt about the genius of land held in common in the UK, before enclosure and privatization, from a new book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of Self-Provisioning Cities. Common land, well managed, fed the people through much of the year:

The idle rich disparaged commoners’ small-­scale farming and foraging as “the trifling fruits of overstocked and ill-­kempt lands.” How wrong they were. A woman’s kitchen garden, foraging, and family cow, pastured on common meadows, could earn as much as a male “breadwinner’s” annual wages, or the same profit as a wealthy farmer with eighty acres after he paid for horses, fertilizer, and labor.

From Wired, the little-known reality of undersea cables that sustain the global internet, and an exploration of how those millions of miles of cable are often recycled:

Billions of people are able to walk around not noticing this infrastructure because of the daily work of a few thousand people, sometimes at sea, other times buried under piles of permits, surveys, and purchase orders for thousands of kilometers of cables that will join the millions of kilometers of cables on the seabed that ensure that our planet is continuously being hugged by light.

Something strange and wonderful from the American Geophysical Union, “Thunderstorms conjure ghostly coronae in treetops, observed outdoors for the first time,” an account of new research which confirms that lightning storms commonly generate “ultraviolet sparkles over large swaths of forest.” These lights emanating out of treetop twigs are not visible to the human eye, but fascinating nonetheless.

From Benji Jones at Vox, “The 15 foods destroying rainforests, in one simple chart,” which is really about one food in particular: beef, which by itself accounts for 42% of food-related deforestation and 52% of food-related CO2 emissions. Over 20 years, rainforest clearcut to make room for grazing beef cattle amounted to 120 million acres. The next three largest food items contributing to tropical deforestation (and carbon emissions) are palm oil, soybeans, and corn/maize, which together erased roughly 50 million acres. Remember, though, that a lot of soy and corn are grown to feed livestock. “The good news here,” Jones says, “is that, without question, consumers can help rainforests by eating less beef.” You can read the original research article in Nature here.

Share

Hello everyone:

This week’s title and topic are taken directly from the sign Heather (my much better half) made for anti-fascism (anti-administration) rallies we attended this past year here in the U.S.. It’s a perfect message for these imperfect times, and I thought I’d explore it with you.

The essay, composed in ten sections, runs a bit long. So I’ll offer half this week and half next week. I have mixed feelings about breaking the writing in half, but am hoping that a prolonged essay is better than an unread (too-long) one. Let me know.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

Ten months after their ship was crushed in the ice of the Weddell Sea, the 28 men of the 1914 Endurance expedition were, against all odds, rescued from what should have been their Antarctic gravesite. For the first five months, they had been camped out on slushy, shifting sea ice with little food and even less hope of seeing home again. Then, after several brutal days packed into small boats amid ice and storm, they found a barren and stony isle, where 22 of the men remained, hungry and sleeping amid the greasy smoke of burnt penguin fat under overturned boats.

Ernest Shackleton, expedition leader, took five men on an 800-mile impossible small boat journey through the world’s wildest seas. They passed like crumbs through the jaws of death again and again, arriving finally as unrecognizable souls at a whaling station, where the effort to rescue the others began. Shackleton’s hair turned gray while he worried about his men for the next three months, as attempt after attempt to reach them failed.

Throughout, Frank Worsley noted, the boss had “kept a mental finger on each man’s pulse” and tending to his needs without drawing attention to them. Meanwhile, on the isle, Frank Wild woke the men each morning, rolled up his moldy sleeping bag, and said, “Get your things ready boys, the boss may come today.” He kept them busy hunting for seals, penguins, and limpets, and kept their thoughts - month after month - on the hope of rescue. He would not abide open fear or melancholy. And it made a difference.

I and others have written about this tale as a saga of extraordinary leadership and heroism. But perhaps it’s better understood as the genius of empathy.

You might say Shackleton’s care and Wild’s good cheer was duty and obligation, but are those not formal terms for empathy in tightly regulated society? You might claim that empathy had little place among rough, hard-bitten men amid tragedy and starvation, but I can tell you from my reading of every Antarctic survival story that empathy was essential to that survival. Those who survived intact had sung songs together, composed mock ballads about each other, argued good-naturedly for hours about menus for fantasized feasts, and celebrated long-awaited birthdays with treats - a few remaining raisins, a slab of seal blubber - in a spirit of the truest comradery.

It cannot be said enough: Empathy is the door to a meaningful life and, in times of trouble, the key to our survival. As in between two seas wrote recently, in another tragic and beautiful shipwreck tale, empathy is how we save each other and ourselves:

there is so much struggle and pain in this world but there is also so much light—so many ways to find light, and to give it, too. Saving what we can save, helping where we can help, fixing what we can fix, doing what we can do—no more, no less.

That is all we can do, and that is enough.

It feels to me, as we watch (and inhabit) the ship of civilization struggling to avoid a lee shore, that we are counting down toward one of two fates: a world that centers itself on empathy, or one that justifies its erasures until erasure comes for us. It’s an ancient tension in human affairs - mutualism vs. parasitism, more or less - but on a new scale.

This essay is one way of imagining that tension and the countdown.

Nine words: The ability to feel what someone else is feeling. Empathy is fundamental to compassion in all its forms, whether intimate care for another, community care for your neighbors, or cross-species care for animals and the landscapes of home.

Empathy is innate, but not a given. It’s clouded, or even killed, by fear. And that’s what I think underlies the bubbling cauldron of conservative rallying cries against “toxic empathy” and “suicidal empathy.” There is, in these weird cries, a desperate attempt to explain away support for policies they fear and loathe - humane immigration programs, racial justice, criminal justice reform, the right to abortion, sexual and gender freedom, climate action, environmental protection, and now even voting rights and the rule of law - as delusions brought on by excessive empathy.

And yes, like fear, empathy can be stimulated by telling ourselves (or, more likely, being told) the wrong story. Neither are inherently logical or blind. Both are, when aptly applied, forms of rationality based on a million years of human evolution. And both can be irrational: The abused can be convinced to feel empathy for their abusers, and abusers often convince themselves to fear those they abuse.

But they differ in their capacity to contain the other. Empathy makes room for fear and tries to allay it. Fear, though, sees empathy as just another threat.

Eighty eight people die unnecessarily per hour, per this report, and nearly 820,000 have died already, specifically because funding for USAID was erased last year. Children account for two thirds of those deaths, more than 550,000 so far. The funds were for programs that fought mortality from malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, malnutrition, diarrhea, pneumonia, and other diseases. USAID saved an estimated 92 million lives in recent decades, but no longer.

That’s the calculus behind the white/Christian nationalist cadre running the U.S. government and who are, at the same time, complaining that empathy is toxic and unnatural.

Seven kilometers outside of Atherton, Australia, is the Tolga Bat Hospital. Like wildlife rescue and rehabilitation centers everywhere, Tolga does astonishing and wonderful work every day with too little money and too little attention. (Wildlife rescue facilities, I think, should be as central to our communities as veterinary offices, schools, and libraries.) In Tolga’s case, they’re the only bat hospital in Australia, and its one paid employee and platoon of volunteers handle a thousand or so bats per year. Many are very young spectacled flying foxes, orphaned when their mothers fall victim to a tick-borne disease that causes paralysis. Other young and adults arrive suffering from heat stress, disease, and injuries from barbed wire.

Read a new Vox article from Benji Jones to see the “unbearably cute patients” in bubble baths and being bottle-fed. Read it also to be reminded of what empathy really is. Jones interviews Jenny Mclean, Tolga’s founder and director:

“You meet a bat, and they’re worth caring about,” Mclean, 71, told me that afternoon, as she fed a sick adult bat fruit juice from a syringe. “They have serious threats that they’re facing, all of them human-induced.”

Mclean, who works around the clock at the hospital and doesn’t pay herself, said she feels a responsibility to help these creatures — not only because they’re suffering at our expense but because they help keep our planet healthy. Flying foxes are exceptionally good at pollinating plants and dispersing their seeds, Mclean said.

Giving back to these animals in some way, she said, is the least we can do.

The small raptor hospital in a poor New Delhi neighborhood, or the turtle rescue center in a Boston basement, and the numerous bird rescue/rehab centers around the globe (like Avian Haven here in Maine) are run by people like Mclean who are empathy pioneers, widening the circle of empathy so that the rest of us can move cautiously forward into the light of kindness.

Six pounds or six ounces? An earlier estimate, still popular, suggested one to six pounds, but newer analysis suggests no more than half a pound. Either way, the microbes that make up much of our body would fill a sizeable container. And, in leaving our body, would unmake us as they themselves would die without the warm embrace of our organs. Humans are not individuals but community, within and without, from the invisibly microbial to the landscape-scale ecological.

Failure to embed that truth in both our workday and spiritual imaginations will unmake us too, as famed biologist Roger Payne wrote in his final essay for Time:

there’s one discovery so consequential that unless we respond to it, it may kill us all, graveyard dead. It is this: every species, including humans, depends on a suite of other species to keep the world habitable for it, and each of those species depends in turn on an overlapping but somewhat different suite of species to keep their niche livable for them.

Our empathy, which is innate but in need of constant activation, must evolve outward and outward and inward. Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us of this in “Becoming Earth,” in Emergence, while describing the ecological intimacy when we lie down in a luxurious bed of moss:

Chlorophyll beckons with lovers’ embrace and my carbon dioxide falls into its arms, woman becoming moss. At the very same moment, the leaf’s green sigh of oxygen goes straight to my blood. Red answers green in the dance of chlorophyll and hemoglobin. Plant breath becomes animal breath, animal becomes plant, plant becomes fungus, fungus becomes plant, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation that fulfills our deepest longing for union with the earth.

I’ll close this first half of the essay with a last-minute addition, thanks to and her February 18th post, in which she quotes Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, whose State of the State address had something to say about empathy:

“I am begging my fellow politicians, my fellow Illinoisans, my fellow Americans to realize that right now in this country we are not fighting over policy or political party,” Pritzker said. “We are fighting over whether we are going to be a civilization rooted in empathy and kindness—or one rooted in cruelty and rage.”

See you next week with the other five sections of the writing.

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

From and Easy by Nature, “Chiseling through ice,” another beautiful illustrated personal essay from Bill, this one on the resilience built when we stay close to the land and model ourselves on those lives (birds, trees, neighbors) who remember how to persist through the hard realities of winter.

From the Volts podcast, a very informative conversation about how alternative meats - whether plant-based or industrially cultured - may go a long way toward solving the extraordinary list of problems caused by the ever-growing consumption of meat by 8.3 billion humans:

Meat is responsible for roughly a fifth of climate change, the lion’s share of deforestation, 70% of our antibiotic use, and quite possibly the next pandemic — and consumption is going up every single year, with no end in sight.

From and Radically Local, “The Age of Abundance is Ending,” a stark message about the impending impacts of climate change on global agriculture - something the world’s major defense agencies are concerned about - and how we should be investing heavily in local sustainable farming and the relationships that come with it. “The real defence strategy,” she writes, “is soil and local growers who refuse to let their communities starve.”

From and By the Numbers, “Does that use a lot of energy?”, a very useful interactive tool for assessing with some precision the amount of energy used by typical household devices. You can compare devices, and set parameters like the amount of time the device is in use.

From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a scientific quest to map and understand soil fungi in regions of the Earth where they have not been reduced by excessive fertilizer and tilling and the increasingly relentless heat of a hotter climate. Fungi, arguably the most important life forms for the future of global agriculture, are hardly on the to-do list for conservation groups.

From and The Crucial Years, “An El Nino is Brewing,” and with it may come extraordinary change in both Earth’s living conditions and in the governance of societies dealing with the consequences.

Two from Phys.org: Deoxygenation of oceans and freshwater ecosystems has been identified as another planetary tipping point, and a more precise map of agricultural emissions around the globe will allow for more effective work in reducing those emissions.

From Yale e360, the complex problem of creating a healthy coexistence between chacma baboons and human residents of Capetown, South Africa. The city’s current plan is not settling the debate between those who want the baboons gone from their neighborhoods and those who insist the baboons have a right to live freely.

From Floodlight, Elon Musk’s massive gas-powered xAI supercomputers on the Mississippi-Tennessee border are flouting EPA and state regulations, and reducing air quality for nearby neighborhoods, by burning massive amounts of methane gas in “portable,” unpermitted turbines.

From Nature Briefs, an excellent overview of coral bleaching, with additional wisdom on the complexity of threats facing corals around the globe, especially as year after year the oceans continue to warm.

From and Predirections, “Bending the curve is possible”: A 10-year total fishing ban on the Yangtze River in China has, in a few years, resulted in notable improvements in a freshwater basin the size of Mexico devastated by habitat loss and overfishing. “Climate and biodiversity stories aren’t all doom and gloom — and here’s proof,” Tonkin writes. “After seven decades of ecological free-fall, the Yangtze River is showing its first signs of recovery.” It has come at a cost (230,000 fishermen and their boats relocated), and no one knows how resilient the recovery will be when fisheries eventually resume, but it is remarkable that such a large-scale recovery is possible.

Share

Hello everyone:

I’ve been feeling caught between the tumult of the news (political and ecological) and the hard cold quietude of winter, and it’s reminded me of the importance of poetry. Poetry, at its best, makes sense of our unknowable world by emanating clarity out of the stillness of the page. We all know, on some level, that language can never speak to the deepest truths, and yet somehow a poem - or a single line - manages it once in a while. As Charlie Simic used to tell us, one of the great things about poetry is that its task is impossible. Join me this week as I offer a (revised) ode to Charlie I wrote three years ago, after learning of his death.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

I wrote in “An Informed Reverence” that “I have enough poetry in me to see that the meeting ground between the physical and the metaphysical is spacious enough to contain all of us.” The statement seems like an intellectual confection, I know, but I meant it literally.

By “physical” I mean the known and tangible world, and by “metaphysical” I’m referring to the abstract concepts conjured up by our minds to pretend an understanding of life’s mysteries: gods, God, good and evil, love, being, and reality, to name a few.

I began my writing life as a poet and had no intention then of doing any writerly thing other than scribbling small strange poems into my notebooks. Poetry seemed both sea and ship to me then, a way of navigating this wonderful, strange, and tragic life in a self-destructive civilization chewing its way through the green world. I spent a couple years earning a Masters in poetry, in part because I knew I needed to anchor the habit of writing into my life before sailing off into the distractions of adulthood.

Since then, I’ve spent my life wandering through landscapes and ideas, looking closely and understanding little, but trying nevertheless to weave things together with phrases crafted finely enough to convert silence into sense.

Why am I telling you this? Because Charles Simic has died, and the world is a lesser place without him. Charlie was one of the great poets of the last half century. He was a child of war, a voice for souls lost to the pages of history, a street-smart philosopher of misery and joy, a lover of blues and jazz and good food, a purveyor of surreal and darkly comic images made “to annoy God, and make the Devil laugh,” and generally a brilliant, funny, and down-to-earth sweet guy. He was fluent in several languages, and translated poems from French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian. He was the 2007-2008 U.S. Poet Laureate. Charlie won a Pulitzer, a MacArthur genius grant, and too many other honors to mention here.

He was also my teacher. For my two years at the University of New Hampshire, he and Mekeel McBride (another brilliant, wonderful, mystery-filled human being) provided space for me to grow as I wrote my small strange poems and went deeper into the literary tradition I had joined.

I’ve somehow spent my life circling quietly in the orbits of very intelligent people, world-class scientists, etc., and am fortunate enough to be married to the most empathetic person I know (empathy, in the end, being the highest form of intelligence), but I’ve never felt the presence of genius like I did around Charlie. I don’t mean to put him on a pedestal – he had his faults, and was the first to acknowledge his ordinariness – but the articulation and humor and depth of historical and philosophical awareness that emanated from him whether in class or in his living room was intense.

Genius, I realized, isn’t mere intelligence; it’s an integrity and force of spirit expressed through a clarity of mind.

Charlie’s method of teaching in poetry workshops consisted mostly of assessing the success of each line and image and their usefulness to the poem. I’d chosen Charlie and UNH over the University of Iowa, which was then the center of the American poetry world, and where, as I understood it, each workshopped poem was examined in 3D for its value system, voice, and aesthetic context. With Charlie, a poem was a mystery built through a mix of fine carpentry, mystery, and philosophy. We heard a lot of “Good” and “Not good” in his thick Yugoslav accent as his pencil carved through the poem like a warm knife through butter. It was a simple process that worked for me: A poem is a crafted object that must be drawn and redrawn until it finds its true form, or fails.

Charlie took great joy in the tension between the seriousness of making poems and the absurdity of the human condition. Love and tragedy, misery and happiness, cruelty and honor, truth and lies, and the mysteries of nature were all threads in the tapestry of life that our poems were somehow trying to convey. The work was both necessary and improbable, and that was funny to him. And he made it funny to us. Here he is in The Monster Loves His Labyrinth:

History is a cookbook. The tyrants are chefs. The philosophers write menus. The priests are waiters. The military men are bouncers. The singing you hear is the poets washing dishes in the kitchen.

He spun up great stories of Dadaist and Surrealist poets enraging their audiences. He offered one-liners borrowed from comedians and blues singers - poetry in other genres - and expressed wonder for a poet like Elizabeth Bishop, who “never wrote a bad poem.” And there was a wealth of poetry experience to be handed down.

One of the nuggets of wisdom that stuck with me is the distinction between the two types of written images: those made “with eyes open” and those made “with eyes closed.” An eyes-open image is a description of the observed (“the tap of a moth on a windowscreen”) while an eyes-closed image (“sediments on the bottom of night’s ink”) is imagined into being. Neither is inherently better than the other, but their relationship to the world is quite different.

I think of the distinction often when mapping out in these pages the path we took to reach the Anthropocene. The folks with eyes open – Indigenous peoples, ecologists, naturalists, children, activists, and anyone else not lost in the supermarket – have always seen and felt the consequences of the destructive imagination that requires the enslavement of the natural world to our desires. With your eyes open, you can better understand the bizarre irrationality of “constant economic growth” and “Are we alone?”

In this distinction is a reminder of the tension between physical vs. metaphysical reality, between the observed vs. the imagined. The meeting ground between them is where we all live, awake to the world but dreaming of alternatives.

Charlie played frequently with this dynamic. Here, for example, is a selection of stanzas from his poem “Trees at Night,” in which the speaker is listening in the darkness to the sound of wind in the branches:

Putting out the light
To hear them better.

The sound of those
Who sleep without dreams.

At times also like the tap
Of a moth
On a windowscreen.

A flurry of thoughts.
Sediments
On the bottom of night’s ink,
Seething, subsiding.

Branches bending
To the boundaries
Of the inaudible.

A prolonged hush
That reminds me
To lock the doors.

Clarity.
The mast of my spine, for instance,
To which death attaches
A fluttering handkerchief.

And the wind makes
A big deal of it.

For an example of straight eyes-open imagery, here are a couple lines from a recent poem by Nomi Stone, “Anthropocene”:

Larkin says what will survive of us is love,
but the scientists say that the end of the decay-chain is lead and uranium and after that,
plastics.

Not that you’d know it from my long essays… but the other essential nugget of wisdom I got from Charlie was his notion of “little said, much meant.” On the page, Charlie was a poet of brevity surrounded by silence. “Of all the things ever said about poetry,” he once said in a brief but excellent Granta interview, “the axiom that less is more has made the biggest and the most lasting impression on me.” Less is more: Charlie knew that words have to compete with silence, where most wisdom lies, and he knew that a terse and mysterious clarity could draw and keep a reader because it hinted at something much larger.

As a result, his obituaries seem to feel obligated to describe his poems as deceptively simple. So much is happening below the surface of a Simic poem, like here in “History:”

You can hear the silence around this narrator – a refugee and his stolen apple exhausted on the side of the road? – as he unapologetically notes his theft in an Eden-less world full of smoke and moral gray areas. Charlie knew that history can be a broom that sweeps away both truth and individual truths.

He grew up in war-torn Sarajevo: “I had a small, nonspeaking part / in a bloody epic,” he wrote in “Cameo Appearance.” Who needs the World News if you’re living it? Just ask the people of Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and others fleeing their homes into gray silences.

Charlie’s thoughts on the value of silence and solitude (from a 1972 interview with Crazy Horse magazine, reprinted in his book The Uncertain Certainty) are worth quoting at length, because at heart what he’s saying is about the soul in the wilderness, which is where we all are:

Silence, solitude, what is more essential to the human condition? “Maternal silence” is what I like to call it. Life before the coming of language. That place where we begin to hear the voice of the inanimate. Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. We are always at the beginning, eternal apprentices, thrown back again and again into that condition. There is a complexity which demands its equivalent in words. Of course, it is impossible to do it justice. I say Yes to the impossible – therefore poetry.

This is what we all share, a condition where both the content and the form are one. The deeper a voice calls from that maternal silence the wider is its echo. Occasionally people think of silence as something negative, passive. For me silence is the spiritual energy. Of course, the paradox is that neither is there such a thing as silence nor is one ever alone.

I wandered off after grad school to Antarctica, a continent of such astonishing quiet that it haunts me still. I felt then, and know now, that I hadn’t emerged from UNH with any really good poems or, worse, a clear voice or purpose. I could make small strange poems, I could channel the mystical energy that feeds the act of poetry, and I could make lines and images sing, but I rarely wrote a poem that felt clear and true. Such failure is the hazard of trying to make art, of course, and it’s also the stimulus. It’s the “impossible” that Charlie mentions above. But my writing faced a bigger challenge.

I’ve often said since that Antarctica erased my poetry, because the silence and icy landscape out-competed the white space of the page. It’s not a place for artifice. But the truth is a bit more complicated. I’d succeeded in anchoring poetry in my life, but after a season on the ice poetry was no longer my sea and ship.

Instead, I obsessed for years on how to write the Antarctic landscape with language at the margin between poetry and prose, often in small prose fragments. Here are two samples:

How to be a witness to an ice age: stand back, scratch your insulated head, fill a notebook with incomplete thoughts. Sketch the gap you hear.

***

Antarctica confronts us with the inherent threat of a landscape more resilient than life. To be made of flesh, and to carry a consciousness that knows the futility of flesh against this cold, is to be living in the moment of a dream in which beauty and death appear as a single seed. The depth of one's fear determines which of these, beauty or death, we believe contains the other.

Eventually, I figured out how to write decent straightforward prose and use it to write Antarctic essays, though I always had my poetic license in my back pocket, just in case. Then I wrote my first book, a narrative history of the human experience of the Antarctic called Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine. I love the book, but Hoosh certainly represents the furthest departure from my poem-scribbling days. I sometimes feel a bit guilty for moving on from poetry, as if I’ve neglected Charlie and Mekeel’s vision of my future, but my journey has been an honest one. I still occasionally write poems, though rarely and slowly.

Now I’m here, crafting my thoughts about the transformed Earth in this field guide to the Anthropocene. I’m beholden largely to an eyes-open aesthetic as I weave together essays about nature and human nature, about problems and solutions. But I’m reminded that Berthold Brecht, in exile from Germany during the build-up to WWII, wrote this dialogue into a poem:

In the dark times

will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing.

About the dark times.

Less is more. These lines contain so much. Is this dark humor, fatalism, or optimism? If the singing is about the darkness, then has the darkness won? Difficult times constrain creativity and obligate artists to respond. But life during struggle is more than just the struggle. Imagination can thrive, even if it has obligations.

Essays about a planet-chewing civilization and its consequences can sing at least a few sentences now and then. Thinking about Charlie and poetry this week is a good reminder that I should close my eyes a bit more often when writing, and sing more often, like in this paragraph from my piece, “We Are Not Alone:”

The Sun’s energy is contained in samara and lichen, woodpecker and hare, fern and mussel and thrip. Everything is alive, always, even in death. Life is defined not by form or heat but by flow and relationship. Everything is connected, and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It seems to me that for naturalists, as for mystics, time and space should seem less units of measure than threads in the fabric.

Charlie was much more a devoted city boy than a naturalist, though he spent the last forty years living in the woods next to a New Hampshire lake. For him, nature was not necessarily something to contemplate: “Nature as experience — making a tomato salad, say, with young mozzarella, fresh basil leaves, and olive oil — is better than any idea about Nature.” And for him, nature was mortality, that vast broom sweeping all of our absurdly grand notions of self and consciousness back into the atomic darkness of the universe.

But, in the face of all that, Charlie had the soul of a wine-drinking, tree-contemplating mystic, a poet who found his true form in this wonderful, sad world as he sent out lines like moths trying to touch whatever it is that forms the silence that contains us all.

You can read quite a few of Charlie’s poems online here. (Scroll down past the bio.) Of the obituaries I’ve read, I liked Scott Simon’s brief and poignant remembrance over at NPR, and a longer, denser appreciation of his work at the New Yorker. The Times has an excellent obit too, as always. For a deeper dive, watch this video interview from PBS and read this interview transcript from The Paris Review.

Finally, then, I’ll say what this too-long essay is trying to say: I miss him.

Thanks for sticking with me.

Leave a comment

In other Anthropocene news:

From Vox, a heartwarming story (with pictures) about sick and injured adorable bats being treated by wonderful people at an Australian bat hospital. The bats, mostly spectacled flying foxes, suffer from a variety of ills, most of them caused by humans. For too many of us, bats are fearful things. This article will help with that.

From and Chasing Nature, “I Hear the Tree Buds Singing,” a beautifully written and illustrated essay on the wonders hidden within a seemingly simple tree bud. Inside, Bryan says, is

a compressed expression of time and space, of songbirds in treetops, butterflies in gardens, and bears in a forest.

When it opens and unfurls in spring, the bud is a Big Bang giving rise to an expanding universe of life and experience in nature. So much potential in each bud, so much promise — we too often pass it by. Someone who did not was Emily Dickinson, who wrote: “How soft the fire of the Bud.”

For me, the soft fire begins with variety, advances to knowledge, and expands profoundly by way of imagination.

On the other end of the empathy-for-forests spectrum, from Grist, the insanity of burning millions of American trees in a UK’s power plant and calling it sustainable. This “biofuel”, like nearly all bioenergy, is an obvious nightmare for life on Earth (i.e. for both the climate and biodiversity crises). These wood-burning power plants emit more CO2 than coal, and are actively erasing forests in Louisiana and Mississippi.

For my Maine readers, from Canary Media, “What’s Driving Up Maine’s Energy Bills? Natural Gas.” Despite years of blame on the state’s high electricity prices being placed on the rise of solar and wind power, a new analysis shows that an unstable methane (so-called “natural gas”) market, and the push to export more U.S. gas abroad, is behind the excess costs. A key solution, according to the analysis, is to rapidly expand the state’s renewable energy portfolio.

From Yale e360, “How Ukraine is Turning to Renewables to Keep the Heat and Lights On,” a round-up of the urgent, remarkable, but still underfunded effort to rebuild Ukraine’s grid around wind and solar amid the constant Russian missile and drone attacks on the old coal- and gas-fired centralized grid. As with so much in Ukraine, there’s so much misery and so much determination to outlive it.

I’m a bit slow to recommend these, but from and The Weekly Anthropocene, a fascinating series of travelogue posts from Sam’s high-paced journey through the world of tomorrow that is contemporary China. Robot air taxis, bullet trains, an extraordinary new electric grid, drone “fireworks”, and rapid urban redesign in the face of a hotter, more turbulent world. As always, Sam is a reliably thorough and enthusiastic narrator.

From Reasons to be Cheerful, an intriguing story of a movement to build DIY wind turbines. The article follows a man on a mission to teach others how to create their own energy source for far less than they would cost on the market.

From Heated, why the fossil fuel industry has mixed feelings about the Trump administration’s wildly irrational effort to repeal the “endangerment finding,” which has been the EPA’s legal rationale for regulating climate-heating gases. If the Supreme Court allows the repeal (likely, given how irrational it has become), the oil and gas and coal companies may be even more threatened by the flood of lawsuits that correctly claim that the companies have knowingly harmed public health and safety. Why? Because the federal government’s regulation of greenhouse gases provided legal cover for the industry.

From and Volts, “Are Utilities Making Too Much Money?,” a clear-headed and sensible podcast discussion on a very, very geeky topic. But the weird inscrutability and sloth-like dislike of rapid change in U.S. utilities is a major factor in this country’s failure to meet the moment, when an all-out shift toward electrification is necessary.

Share