A 2024 Field Guide Reader
1/2/25 - some highlights from the past year
Hello everyone:
Greetings from the first days of 2025. I’m only now back home after a busy few weeks with family. There’s so much unknown ahead of us this year - and the years to follow - but it can wait another week. I want to start the year slowly by briefly looking back, as I did last year at this time.
In this post-holiday lull, if you’re so inclined you can look back over some of the specific hard issues I’ve addressed over the last year - the Endangered Species Act after 50 years, the possible collapse of Atlantic Ocean currents, an introduction to global ecological tipping points, the future of dams and hydropower, the destructiveness of bottom trawling, or the incredibly toxic lifecycle of tires, to name a few.
In keeping with a more restful holiday theme, though, I’m more interested in looking back to see what I’ve had to say about our relationship to the real world. A year of the Field Guide is tens of thousands of words working to explain the human transformation of Earth, but in the end what I’m after is to articulate as clearly as possible a love of life and a rationale for helping it to thrive.
So here are some of my pictures from the year, each accompanied by short excerpts of some of my favorite writing about who and where we are.
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:
from “Whether the Storm”:
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, it is sacred, though we forget that. We still acknowledge that it is mysterious and magical, but that acknowledgment is also sometimes an admission that we don’t really know what we’re harming even as we multiply our harms…
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.
from “Consciousness is Organic”:
Civilization, I came to realize, is a painted theater in a forest. Cultures strut and fret upon the stage, while each of us is increasingly glued to our seat. We call the theater the world, forgetting that beyond the doors are the biology and physics, the ecology and chemistry, the leaf and the breeze, that define the real world.
Over the last century or two, we have seemed intent on bringing the forest inside the theater and reducing it to a set piece in the wings. With nearly eight billion of us in the room and perhaps two billion more on the way, we have a decision to make about whether to keep telling the same stories about the theater, or try to remember how to live in right relationship with the living world.
Life will always outlive us, even as we diminish it here and extinguish it there, but the choices we make now will define how livable and lush the Anthropocene will be.
from “The Depth of Winter”:
We were once forcibly embedded in winter like a leaf in pond ice. It fell upon us like a weight or strange bounty. Now winter visits but does not linger. The worlds of high altitude and high latitude once descended into ours, making a desolate aerie even of the ice-locked lowlands. Now we look up through addled atmosphere at mountaintops whose own snow and glacial ice drains away to valley and sea.
Still, though, when it’s here winter helps us recalibrate how we define beauty. Winter weeds stand as elegant, dry bouquets against the white expanse. The blue and blank canvases of ice and snow make an island of each tree and shrub, their moss- and lichen-touched bark no longer hidden among the greens and browns of the living seasons, their buds each a tight glossy miracle, and their forms an elegant dark dance in their reach for light. Winter light reaches what stands both slantly from above and softly from below. Bark, especially, reveals the nuances of earthly colors while fashionably flaunting a designer line of crustose, squamulose, foliose, and fruticose lichens.
As Thoreau wrote once in his journal, “The dry grasses are not dead for me. A beautiful form has as much life at one season as another.”
from “How to Think Like a Forest”:
The living world breathes on so many time scales, from the microscopic to the millennial, that it scarcely recognizes our sense of time at all. Nutrients, genes, and energy move in waves and circles, as change across ecosystems and landscapes occurs with the elegance of the surface of the sea. On a timeframe foreign to modern human sensibility, species come and go and communities change form. Forests have their “methodical procedures” too, though we are still largely ignorant of them. And that ignorance has led us to rupturing most Earth systems and erasing much of the planet’s primary forest in far less time than it takes for a redwood tree to reach maturity.
from “The Paths Most Traveled”:
The public conversation about migration usually focuses on the epic scale: the vast herds of wildebeest or caribou, the vast distances of Arctic terns and gray whales. But those are the migrations that inspire the human eye and mind. I think they trigger the collective memory of our own restless globe-spanning irruptions over the last million years, while also reminding us of our more recent relentless colonial expansions.
But we marvel at these long journeys as individual accomplishments rather than the miraculous swaying of energy through astonishingly complex systems. Worse, as we grow more distant from the living world, we see these movements as rare and strange while forgetting that they have been ubiquitous and normal since long before humans spread out from Africa.
Everyone is in motion. Migrations happen at every scale and in every environment. From dragonflies and snakes to salmon and tuna, and from warblers and hummingbirds to ants and salamanders, life hums its tunes while ambling down endless paths. Spiders and their gossamer sails, eels and their mysterious origins, swifts and their alien airborne lives: It may be wiser to think of migrations as extensions of ordinary busy life rather than exceptions to it. Even the thoughtful and imaginative – and essential – explorations by fungal mycelia and slime molds look like journeys to me, even if they are journeys in which each organism is in many places at once.
from “Most Human”:
The task for all of us is to continue broadening the circle of empathy outward through all human forms of justice, and then beyond us to our domestic animals, and finally to the rich and complex community of life. When it becomes common sense to believe that other species – even nature itself – should have legal rights, then we’ll be on the path to reuniting our cognition with the world as it is. Or, put another way, we need to remember that the best use of our powerful imagination is not to shape the natural world for our purposes but instead to live intelligently, respectfully, and beautifully within its limits. In the end, we won’t have a choice. Limits are limits, and they’re arriving fast.
from “Putting Hands to Work”:
We are social apes in a world of stone, ocean, fire, air, soil, microbes, insects, plants, and animals. We’re only a part of the biodiversity. In fact, we’re nothing without the community of life. But we live in a era in which a few centuries of destructive human behavior have made any discussion of biodiversity a depiction of lives being lost, of the diminishment of solitary bees, pangolins, hemlock trees, forest elephants, right whales, prairie grass, and millions more.
All of which is to say that it’s vital for us to step out of the human theater whenever we can and put our hands to work saving plants and animals that are right in front of us. We desperately need the connection, and they desperately need us to reconnect.
from “Reimagining Rain”:
Rain doesn’t live in the sky:
It lives in the ocean and lakes and sends a little of itself to rise with the wind to greet the Sun. It lives in the soil and commutes to the atmosphere through plants. Water begets water, soil is the womb, and vegetation is the midwife, as Millan Millan and Rob Lewis reminded us. The formation of rain on high, and its descent, are only part of a journey that begins at our feet. Or really, it neither begins nor ends. Rain breathes, and breathes the world into being.
Mostly it sleeps: in lakes and mountain glaciers for decades, in shallow groundwater for a couple centuries, in the ocean for millennia, in deep groundwater for 10,000 years, and in Antarctic ice for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Its time in the atmosphere, in contrast, is a lark that lasts only nine days.
from “Unresolved”:
All identities are unresolved, it seems to me. Everything is in motion. The recipe for matter is energy thickened with time, all of it as likely to be eaten by entropy as a cookie warm out of the oven. What we think of as a fixed world made of solid objects is neither fixed nor solid, neither fixed nor broken.
Mountains rise and fall. Continents bob and sink back into magma, oceans stretch wide and then close up. The delicate atmosphere clings like thin film to the Earth but roils in constant motion, spinning up cyclones and tornadoes like small eddies in a stream. The constant churn of soil and seed into plant and animal, and back again, regulates much of the flow of water through earth and sky.
The lines we draw between species grow thin as we find that life is far more subtle than our ideas. Microbes hand genes to each other like currency. A broad glance at the animal kingdom belies our cultural insistence on defined gender and sexuality. Our entire notion of “individual” was never real, as we find organisms are really communal containers for life linked inextricably to an endless chain of other living communities.
from “Leveling Up”:
The turbulent surface of the sea is the politics of wind and tide. Storms come and go. But the tempest of existence isn’t only oceanic. We live in an intertidal zone between past and future Earths. Terra firma is, in the big picture, as much a fiction as sea level. On a planet whose atmosphere spins up into whirlwinds, whose organic life churns through a multiplicity of floral and faunal forms, whose continents arise from and float on and disappear into a hidden sea of magma, we have to remain conscious of the inherent instability of the place we call home.
Better yet, we have to embrace a better role for ourselves within the tempests, even while recognizing that we are deeply irrational creatures with even more irrational social structures. We’re all gathered around the dinner table, telling stories about ourselves. Our identities are mere name tags in the whirlwind, but they’re also the stories we use to live a meaningful life. And the most meaningful life we can live right now, in this enormously difficult bottleneck in both human and Earth history, is to ground ourselves in the beautiful living world and work to reduce our harm to the rest of life.
The sea is rising, and we need to rise with it.
from “Mirror Worlds”:
We don’t need these artificial mirror worlds. We already live in world that contains innumerable mirrors and countless other worlds. For fun, start by looking in a calm puddle or pond. Water was the first mirror. Then, look to the life around us. Look your dog in the eye and ask what she thinks. Spend enough time with a daisy or a dung beetle that you realize their lives are a complete and complex mystery. In the beautiful, joyous, and bewildering multiplicity of species, each has their own umwelts and communities and needs.
Finally, if you feel the need to associate yourself with billion trillions and septillions, fill one cupped hand with seawater and the other with good soil. All of life is there, more or less.
from “Standing Still”:
The light brings with it the memory of sustenance and the promise of life to carry us through the hardest months. Even now, seeds and rootlets embedded in their vast communities of microbes and living soil are prepared, when light and warmth release them, to grow restless and then to grow with a full-bodied embrace of the sun.
So much of life on Earth (in the temperate and polar zones) hinges on this annual tide of light. The sun fuels every living cell on the surface of the planet, which means that every ecological community is a conversation about light. It’s worth pausing with the solstice to think about how best to rebuild our portion of this world in a way which honors that conversation. After all, from the miracle of photosynthesis and the rhythm of seasonality we build our bodies, our families, our societies, our economies, and our wobbly empires.
The more we listen to the Earth breathing through its ancient cycles, the more we can remember to breathe with it.
Thanks for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
From Reasons to be Cheerful, their year in review list of “144 ways the world got better in 2024,” many of which are environmental.
From the Revelator, a magazine issued by the indispensable Center for Biological Diversity, 1) a list of their top 14 environmental commentaries of the year. “They offer… advice for saving species from extinction, guidance on shaping green jobs, insights into Indigenous knowledge, and more.” And 2) “Sloths, Salmon, and Autocrats,” a list of their most-read articles in 2024.
From For the Generations, learn how to become a Green Amendment Ambassador. They’re looking for “enthusiastic, dedicated volunteers to… help spread the word about the importance and values of a Green Amendment in your state and help us to grow our individual and organization support base.” It’s been a while since I’ve written on Green Amendments, but the idea is already enshrined in a few state constitutions and provided the foundation for the major court victory in Montana by a group of young people claiming the state’s fossil fuel policies violated their rights to a healthy environment. Here’s a summary of the concept:
The goal of the Green Amendments For The Generations is to advance a Green Amendment movement that sweeps the nation and secures for all people constitutional recognition and protection of their inalienable rights to pure water, clean air, a stable climate and healthy environments. We seek to inspire and support pursuit and passage of self-executing, environmental rights amendments in the Bill of Rights section of every state constitution across the U.S. and ultimately at the federal level. Once accomplished, we will work with communities to ensure their strong and meaningful implementation and enforcement.
From Orion, the composer John Luther Adams writes beautifully of his decades-long friendship with the great writer Barry Lopez, who has long been a subtle but strong guiding light for me and many others facing up to the transformation of the beautiful world:
Barry has gone on across that last liminal line, beyond the edge of the known. The storms he saw gathering on the horizon have reached us now, and they continue to rise with growing ferocity. Yet the world is still beautiful, as it’s always been, as it always will be. And once again I feel myself walking that tightrope between beauty and terror.
From Michelle Nijhuis and Conservation Works, a fun and thoughtful linkage between Woody Guthrie’s new year’s resolutions and the hard work that needs doing right now.
Today, Guthrie’s gift for clarity is more necessary than ever. Inside what Smith calls our “digitally modified slumber,” we’re all too easily persuaded to abandon our convictions. We need to not only make resolutions but carry them with us, expressed in the shortest, sharpest words we have: Eat good. Stay glad. Dance better. Wake up and fight.
This is a beautifully presented review of your poetic and insightful writings, Jason. Thanks! Your words below really struck me today:
“We’re all gathered around the dinner table, telling stories about ourselves. Our identities are mere name tags in the whirlwind, but they’re also the stories we use to live a meaningful life. And the most meaningful life we can live right now, in this enormously difficult bottleneck in both human and Earth history, is to ground ourselves in the beautiful living world and work to reduce our harm to the rest of life.”
All the best to you and your family in 2025!
Happy New Year and thank you for the beautiful retrospective.
My Sheltie Bennie and Border Collie Skye bark and spin "Hello!" to Hollie the Collie!