On The Move

6/24/21

Happy Solstice, everyone. Last Tuesday at 11:32 p.m. (EST), days in the northern hemisphere stopped growing longer (and days in the southern hemisphere stopped growing shorter). The tilted axis of the Earth, as it makes its solar orbit, creates these seasons that define our lives. Now, as the northern summer begins, so does the slow retreat into shorter days and longer nights. It’s never quite felt right to me that the onset of summer is also the starting line in the path to winter, but that’s just because my brain is still more attached to the long summer days of childhood than to the lessons of basic astronomy.

Recent nights here in Maine have been perfect for late-night firefly spectacles. I try to take a moment with them before bed by turning off the house lights, going outside, and standing under the shimmering moonless sky to watch the field, dense with grasses and annuals, speak in sparks and arcs of code to say that life in the Anthropocene is still here and pulsing with the intent to perpetuate itself so long as conditions allow.

So long as conditions allow… The Anthropocene means that humans are, for the foreseeable future, the prime mover in setting the conditions for life on Earth. What we do matters to every other species. Or, more to the point, what we decide to do or not do matters, particularly in terms of the climate. All I’ve written about so far – the ubiquity of plastic pollution, the possibility of mass extinctions, the stark evidence for warming/deoxygenating/acidifying oceans, and other cheerful stuff – suggests that there’s not much time left to redirect civilization in a way that will preserve a recognizable Earth for our descendants.

But brevity is not impossibility. Witness the fireflies, who have evolved a mating strategy which relies on making light on the shortest nights of the year. It seems counterintuitive, but it works beautifully. And has worked beautifully for millions of years.

We should be so lucky. Beginnings and endings are not what they used to be. To ensure that we (and a vibrant community of life) will be around for the long haul, we’d better start moving.

Which brings me back to solstices and solar systems and all thing astronomical. Whatever happens in the next century or two to the current forms of solar-powered protoplasm (that’s you, me, fireflies, viruses, palm trees, cicadas, sea turtles, lichens, blue-eyed grass, brook trout, dulse, giraffes, etc.), the movement of the spheres will continue on a time-frame beyond our understanding. That’s cold comfort, of course, but it feels good to stand quietly in the dewy grass and contemplate something larger than the Anthropocene.

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Speaking of movement… Heather and I are moving house. Everything is packed or in disarray. My books are in boxes, my computer is propped up on a folding table, and my mind is elsewhere. We had planned for next week to be the big push, but here we are instead. With any luck I’ll be back to full writing mode next week.

Until then, I’ll provide you with a bit more cold comfort: some photos from my time in Antarctica. Enjoy.

Adelie penguin at a McMurdo Station airfield, with my fuel truck in background

Julian Ridley on the Odell Glacier

Adelie penguins on the sea ice of McMurdo Sound

22 degree halo with sundogs (parhelia) at left and right, and part of an upper tangent arc at top

Self-portrait on Odell Glacier

Partial solar eclipse viewed through the curved lens of my ski goggles. Note the displaced eclipse image in lower right.

Three friends/coworkers watching the annual ice breaker arrive

Icebreaker at the dock, with McMurdo Station in background

Cape Roberts field camp - a multinational team set up camp on the sea ice of McMurdo Sound to drill core samples from sea floor sediments

West Antarctica field camp

Antarctica and the Anthropocene - fuel supply for a field camp

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In Recent Earth-Shattering News:

1. A beautiful essay, “Woman in the Woods”, by Sandra Steingraber, about resilience and cancer and deer and environmental toxins: https://orionmagazine.org/article/woman-in-the-woods/

2. Evidence that common plastics (BPA, BPS) damage brain function after just one month of exposure: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-01966-w

3. Freshwater lakes are losing oxygen even faster than the oceans: https://scitechdaily.com/worlds-lakes-losing-oxygen-rapidly-as-planet-warms-biodiversity-and-drinking-water-quality-threatened/

4. Coastal sea ice in the Arctic is thinning twice as fast as we thought: https://scitechdaily.com/on-thin-ice-arctic-coastal-sea-ice-thinning-twice-as-fast-as-thought/

5. More evidence that the worst mass extinction in Earth history was preceded by rapid warming: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/doi/10.1130/G48795.1/598763/Pace-magnitude-and-nature-of-terrestrial-climate