An Interview With the Field Guide
6/30/22 – Q and A with Diana Haemer of In Circulation
Hello everyone:
I’m offering something a bit different this week: an interview. See below for details.
As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the post to read this week’s curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to this week’s writing:
Diana Haemer, author of the Substack newsletter In Circulation, was kind enough to contact me recently to ask if I’d be willing to answer a few questions about my work here in the Field Guide. In Circulation is Diana’s weekly effort to help readers understand the oceans in this age of climate change. As she writes, “The five major oceans cover 71% of the earth’s surface, yet they are consistently overlooked by science writers and policy makers alike.” Her goal is to ensure that “anyone with even the most casual interest in the ocean will walk away with new knowledge.” If this interests you, please subscribe to In Circulation and join Diana in her journey.
In the meantime, here is our interview. Please note that it wasn’t conducted in person or by voice. Because I was on the island and out of touch for much of the last couple weeks, I asked Diana to email me her questions so that I could work on them when I had time.
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Diana: First of all, what motivated you to start your newsletter? Do you have a science or humanities background (or both, like me)?
Jason: My motivation has both long- and short-term sparks behind it. I’m not a scientist – I have a MFA in poetry, and majored in English – but have always been science-adjacent and an avid reader of science news. My father was a fisheries scientist who spent his career managing North Atlantic commercial fish stocks. He didn’t consider himself an environmentalist, but his philosophy was that management was crucial because our impacts on the rest of life are substantial and ongoing. Then I ended up working in Antarctica for a decade, surrounded by scientists doing fascinating work in an astonishing place. It was a great place to see science in action describing and advising this world we’re rapidly transforming, particularly through climate change. I wrote a book about Antarctic history and culture and was ruminating for some years on another book about the connections between Antarctica and the Anthropocene, but I couldn’t quite pin down how I wanted to write it.
Then, a few years ago, my family ended up in a pitched battle with an ill-conceived and aggressive large-scale development next door to the family farm here in Maine. The irony was that the developer was a botanical garden with Disneyland ambitions. They described the institution as “green” and environmentally-friendly even as they clear-cut 24 acres of crucial forested wetland habitat in order to build a Walmart-sized parking lot. (The wetlands are vernal pools which, in terms of forest biodiversity, are essential, particularly for amphibians.) The battle went badly, for both the vernal pools and us, and it got me thinking that if even “green” institutions in a nature-friendly place like Maine were capable of such egregious mistakes, there was a serious need for more writers to explain the world as it is – moving rapidly toward an Eocene climate and the cusp of a mass extinction – not as we imagine it to be.
Someone introduced me to Heather Cox Richardson’s excellent Letters From An American daily column on Substack, and it seemed to me that Substack could provide a platform for the work I wanted to do. So I jumped in with both feet. That was 63 newsletters ago.
D: Could you define the term “Anthropocene” for those who don’t know what it means? Who is your newsletter’s target audience? What do you hope to teach them? How does your writing help them understand what it means to live in the Anthropocene?
J: The Earth has a 4 billion year history written in the stones. That history has been mapped by geologists into sections both large and small. (Many of us have heard of the Jurassic period, for example, which was a dinosaur-filled age of Earth history that stretched from 200 million years ago to 145 million years ago.) The Anthropocene is the recently proposed name for the current geological epoch. The name, from the Greek anthropo for “human” and cene for “new,” translates as “the new human epoch,” and is being proposed because humans have already transformed the Earth so extensively that even if we disappeared tomorrow our signature would be visible in the geologic record millions of years from now.
Depending on who you ask, the Anthropocene began at least 10,000 years ago (with the birth of agriculture and other cultural shifts) or two centuries ago (with the Industrial Revolution) or several decades ago (during the great acceleration of population and its impacts in the mid-20th century). In the context of Earth’s 4 billion year history, though, there’s no real difference between these options.
The Anthropocene is an awkward term to use, and problematic because it seems to imply that all humans are responsible for Earth’s transformation, rather than a handful of nations made wealthy on fossil fuels and the global resources they (we) have commandeered, but I haven’t seen a better replacement.
I’m hoping with the Field Guide to serve an audience of people who have a sense that the world is deeply changed by human activity and who want to know more about both the problems and the solutions. My Field Guide concept is built around the idea that we need to be familiar with the scale and depth of Earth’s transformation. We need to see it everywhere because it is everywhere.
On some level every writer wants readers to see or at least glimpse the world as they see it, and that’s certainly true for me. Early in my adult life I felt astonished at how many people either didn’t seem to notice or care that the natural world that had nurtured our species was disappearing. I know now that most of us do notice and do care, but don’t fully understand it or know what to do about it. We’re all trapped in a runaway civilization that’s intensely focused on building a life both trivial and wildly destructive.
D: Most of your newsletter posts are serialized (parts 1-3, e.g.) so that you can explain all sides of a topic. How do you pick your subjects? What is your research/knowledge-gathering process?
J: My multi-part posts are only occasionally planned that way. More often my interest in and articulation of the topic keeps growing as I’m writing, and one of the many freedoms of Substack is that I get to determine the content and length of my writing on the fly. Also, I try not to overwhelm my readers in any given post (though I know it happens sometimes anyway).
Sometimes I pick my topics; other times they pick me. I have an ongoing list of topics, perhaps 40 or so at the moment, that I’d like to get to at some point. They range from methane to the Half-Earth Project to the Antarctic “library of ice.” But every week I add new ones, and often something pops up to displace all my plans and send me in a new direction that excites me.
Because each post is written within a week, my research process is woven into the flow of the writing rather than pieced together over a longer stretch before I begin to write. Jumping in with both feet to this weekly Substack publishing cycle has been a wild ride for me. Writing nonfiction before this was always a slow process, with lots of groundwork done before writing. Now, each week, I build the plane after I’ve taken off.
D: Some people (myself included) think it’s too late to stop climate change. Do you agree or disagree?
J: Absolutely. Climate change is already well underway. The world is largely hotter and drier, weather is less predictable, species are on the move, ecosystems are in flux, the ocean is 30% more acidic than any time in human history (because of our excess CO2 production), and agriculture and insurance companies and island nations are struggling to adapt. The question is how much further it will go before our actions slow and then reverse the process. We’re a few toes over the threshold into a catastrophe unfamiliar in the entire history of our species, and only the size and duration of the catastrophe remain to be determined. If everyone truly understood the full scale of climate change already occurring, and the full array of problems being caused for natural and human communities, then most humans would be rallying to the cause. But not enough of us understand it yet. So I’m trying to do my little part with the Field Guide, particularly by talking about the larger context in which climate change is taking place. It is, after all, just one symptom of the Anthropocene.
D: I wrote in one of my newsletters that many journalists and popular news outlets catastrophize climate change by provoking an emotional reaction. In doing so they leave out many important facts. For example, headlines about the Great Barrier Reef’s bleaching events often do not reference new scientific discoveries that some corals are more resilient to heat stress than others, or that many corals recover from bleaching. Similarly, when covering the latest IPCC Report the media’s call to action was almost always about reducing greenhouse gases, implying that all other measures would be futile. While this is of course fundamental to reversing climate change, the Report emphasized the need for investment in specific adaptation strategies & mitigation technologies, a conclusion that was at times conveniently ignored. When writing Field Guide to the Anthropocene, do you find it difficult to incorporate all the necessary information? And do you share my frustration with the “mainstream” media’s treatment of climate solutions?
J: You do an excellent job, Diana, covering the topic of catastrophe-focused reporting. My readers should check it out. I will only add that reporting on climate change is a difficult task in a hypermediated world. The science can be complex, the time frame is large, and the foundation of the story, no matter how optimistic, makes us feel at least a little bit complicit (as it should). In a global crisis is it the media’s job to just report the basic facts or to motivate action? Should they keep it simple or make an effort to convey its complexity? As always, the daily media often focus on the simple versions and report within the echo chamber on the same things other media are reporting. Media and consumers like that kind of repetition, up to a point, but it’s contingent upon the media to go deeper sometimes and for consumers to seek out the deeper reporting.
Provoking emotional reactions with news stories probably seems like the best course for some journalists and editors because it can both make it real and motivate a response. But as you note it emphasizes an emotional response to catastrophe over creating an understanding of the more nuanced reality.
Even within your coral bleaching example, though, the amount of good news within the bad is pretty limited, and emphasis on those few corals that promise a modicum of coral survival by mid-century could make listeners/readers feel like they’re off the hook. It doesn’t take much for people to believe they’re off the hook, right? That’s partly how we got here. So I see it as a balancing act (made all the trickier because the topic has been politicized and disinformed by fossil fuel companies.)
Yes, while writing the Field Guide it is difficult to know how much research and information to incorporate. Some readers are voracious and want links to follow, while others want a lighter information load to digest each week. And for my own sanity I have to identify limits on my version of a story that could easily generate books. So I try to find a middle ground that’s both thorough and readable.
D: The world’s most powerful & influential governments (aka the West) often ignore the oceans when developing environmental policies. Why do you think this is? Do you think it’s necessary for these future climate solutions to include measures to protect and conserve our oceans?
J: You’re so right about the lack of attention on the oceans. Governments and other policy-makers are, I think, reflecting basic human nature. The reality is that the oceans are entwined in nearly every aspect of human life – from climate to dinner – but because we’re land-dwellers we don’t think or worry about them as much as we should. You mentioned in your piece on the problem of catastrophe reporting that we have a hard time thinking of the ocean as part of our daily environment, and I think that’s correct.
As you know, I wrote up a two-part series on the state of the oceans last year. There’s so much that we need to be paying attention to and working to change. Climate policy should be attending to the health of the oceans because the oceans are essential for global biodiversity and human survival. A warming ocean is more acidic and less oxygenated, and thus it’s less able to withstand the fishing pressure of a growing human population.
The story at the core of this that I think about a lot is ocean acidification. The oceans have been absorbing the bulk of our excess carbon, and the increase in carbonic acid is rapidly changing the entire foundation of oceanic food webs. You may be more tuned into this discussion, Diana, but other than some research here or some start-ups there I have heard very little about investment in active mitigation strategies that can promise even a little of the reduction in acidification we’ll need to sustain ocean biomes and fisheries.
D: Lastly, how do you think the next 50 years of the Anthropocene will play out? Will humanity continue to harm the planet or will we finally, collectively, take responsibility for climate change?
J: Hard question, but the easy answer is both. On one hand there’s so much Anthropocene harm baked into our civilizational norms (chemical-based agriculture, greenhouse gas emissions, plastic production, population growth, overfishing, etc.) that even as we slowly begin to respond to the acute consequences of climate change we’ll be pushing well beyond the boundaries of what a healthy, biodiverse planet can support. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that we don’t have a choice but to change our ways. And once large-scale drawdown of carbon and methane emissions becomes the norm, once industrial-scale agriculture becomes supportive of biodiversity, and once care for the health of the oceans becomes a global priority, things should stabilize. I don’t have a sense of how long that will take, but the sooner we take action the less planetary harm will be caused.
And then actually improving conditions for the full, beautiful array of life on Earth to a point that is better than where we are today – to the Earth of my childhood, or of my parents’ childhood – is a much, much harder goal to achieve or predict. But it should be the goal. Where we are now is neither healthy nor sustainable.
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My thanks to Diana Haemer of In Circulation for the chance to think about these questions, and for allowing me to print the interview here.
And thanks to you, as always, for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
Summer nature/science/Anthropocene reading list: from The Revelator, a list of 14 new books to spark your love and concern for the natural world.
The Umwelt of animals: From the New York Times, Ed Yong (science writer for the Atlantic) introduces us to the extraordinary ways in which animals perceive the world, all of which are in his new book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.
Finally, some signs of a backlash against the energy-use insanity of bitcoin: from Yale e360, a story of a Texas town’s residents pushing back against fossil-fuel burning to create these unnecessary financial tokens.
Also from Yale e360, “Weaving Nature Back Into the Urban Fabric,” as a way of addressing the biodiversity and climate crises and helping cities prepare for climate impacts.
From the always-great Orion, Barbara Kingsolver ruminates in a brief and beautiful essay about a trip to Congo and what it demonstrated about the ever-increasing distance between urban humanity and the rest of life on Earth.
“A Hot Ocean is a Hungry Ocean,” from Anthropocene magazine: As sea temperatures rise, so do fish metabolisms, transforming oceanic food webs in a variety of fundamental ways scientists are struggling to understand as the changes occur in real time.
From the Washington Post, an article about the first-ever arrangement between the Bureau of Land Management, National Forest Service, and five nations in the Southwest (Hopi, Pueblo, Ute, Ouray, and Navaho) to co-manage the Bears Ears National Monument.
