Continuing our Poem Revisited blog feature, below is a poem by Terrain.org early contributor Sherry Saye — this one from Issue No. 3:
Many, no millions
Many, no millions of notes,
dark fingers bare and frozen,
each reach a paint-blown curve
toward bliss, they hiss wind,
vie close hollow sound.
Too, it could be the music of you,
but it is empty brown lifted deep,
surging sweet crystalline clatter
from the warm thick river,
glistening weightless on the tips,
the very tips of twigs.
No matter how dire environmental conservation and the may future look, there are always stories worth giving thanks over. This is one of them:
Seven New Global ReLeaf Restoration Projects Announced
Strong public and business support opens more projects for ‘green gift giving’
Washington, DC (Nov. 25, 2009) – American Forests, the Washington, DC-based nonprofit, has announced the addition of seven projects to its global project inventory for 2009. Support has been so great for American Forests’ ecosystem restoration program Global ReLeaf, that the organization has taken on new projects in California, Colorado, Texas, Nicaragua, Honduras and Mexico. Along with those announced last spring, and those carried over from 2008 projects, these will bring the number of trees planted in 2009 up to 4.2 million.
Every dollar donated to the Global ReLeaf program results in the planting of a tree in an ecosystem restoration project. The newest projects (see descriptions below) will restore wildfire-burned sites in California, replant ponderosa pine lost to disease in Colorado, and protect scarce water resources at risk from deforestation in the Americas. Nearly half of the new trees will be planted in partnership with the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge, one of the most biologically diverse regions in North America.
“It is thanks to the generosity of our individual members, as well as our corporate partners, that we have been able to accomplish so much,” says Executive Director Deborah Gangloff. “And it is our trust in that generosity and spirit, especially powerful around the holidays, that we have the confidence to set new goals.”
Since the first Global ReLeaf forest planting 19 years ago to create habitat for the endangered Kirtland’s warbler in Michigan, well over 25 million trees have been planted, and the organization recently announced a goal to plant 100 million trees by the year 2020. Descriptions of most projects can be found online at www.americanforests.org. Scores of them have been the subject of articles in American Forests magazine, the organization’s flagship publication now marking its 115th year of publication.
Planting trees with American Forests on behalf of friends and loved ones is a unique and meaningful gift option this holiday season. With the many benefits that these trees bring to the environment and to communities, it is truly a gift that keeps giving. And at only $1 per tree, it’s one of the most cost effective green gifts available: www.americanforests.org.
American Forests will be accepting proposals for its first round of 2010 projects through January 15th.
New 2009 project summaries:
California
Duncan Canyon Restoration Project
American Forests is partnering with The Forest Foundation and volunteers from the Western States 100 Endurance Run to plant 4,000 trees in areas of Duncan Canyon in the Tahoe National Forest that have not recovered from the 2001 Star Fire.
Moonlight Fire Restoration Project
This project will plant 11,900 trees in an effort to restore and improve forest ecosystems affected by the 2007 Moonlight Fire. The planting will improve the Indian Creek and Lights Creek watersheds, and provide habitat for vulnerable species such as the White Spotted Owl.
Colorado
Vigil & Abeyta Mesa Reforestation
American Forests is partnering with The Forest Foundation and volunteers from the Western States 100 Endurance Run to plant 4,000 trees in areas of Duncan Canyon in the Tahoe National Forest that have not recovered from the 2001 Star Fire.
Texas
Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge Project
In the 13th phase of this long-term project, American Forests is partnering with the Lower Rio Grande National Wildlife Refuge to plant 300,000 trees as part of the Refuge’s Farmland Phase-Out and Revegetation program. The project area encompasses four counties in one of the most biologically diverse regions in North America. The refuge supports over 490 species of birds alone.
Honduras
The Trinidad Conservation Project
This project will plant 35,000 trees in the Santa Barbara district of Honduras in order to purify and protect water sources there. The project is also intended to improve the quality of life for the hundreds of families that live in the region.
Mexico
Nevado de Toluca Water Factory
In partnership with Reforestamos Mexico, this project will plant 170,000 trees in the region surrounding the Nevado de Toluca Mountain, which provides water, climate regulation, and biodiversity for millions of Mexicans in the most densely populated area of the country. The project also includes fire protection and prevention activities, and maintenance of 250 hetacres of previously reforested land.
Nicaragua
Reforestation and Conservation In Nicaragua
American Forests is partnering with Sustainable Harvest International (SHI) to plant 78,000 trees in areas throughout Nicaragua to protect water sources, restore degraded areas, and improve wildlife habitat.
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American Forests’ mission is to grow a healthier world by working with communities to restore and maintain forest ecosystems. Our work includes planting trees, calculating the value of urban ecosystems, fostering environmental education, and giving national voice to community-based forest policy interests.
Rope
by Alison Hawthorne Deming
Penguin Poets (Penguin Books), 2009
From the publisher:
Alison Hawthorne Deming’s fourth collection of poems follows the paths of imagination into meditations on salt, love, Hurricane Katrina, Greek myth, an experimental forest, and the search for extraterrestrial life. These disparate interests are linked by the poet’s faith in art as an instrument for creating meaning, beauty, and continuity — virtues diminished by the velocity and violence of our historical moment. The final long poem, “The Flight,” inspired by the inclusive poems of A.R. Ammons, is a 21st century epic poised on the verge or our discovering life beyond Earth.
Quoth Christopher Cokinos, editor of Isotope and writer of poetry and prose:
“Alison Deming seems in this book like a poetic delta in which run the rivers of Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, May Swenson, and Frank O’Hara. This book pitches into chant, slides into talk, candles the self and finds the solitary paths we’re all on. ‘Mercy was a skill my hands would have to learn,’ she says — and poetry this fine is a form of mercy too, I think, an act of compassion, a gift.”
Sample poems (with audio):
Read (and listen to Alison Deming read) three poems from Rope also in the current issue of Terrain.org:
As the old adage goes, we live in interesting times — we always do, of course, and yet doesn’t it seem that with technology’s exponential growth, global climate change, globalization in general, and the profusion of literature and art that in fact we do live in the most interesting of times? Literature and art, in fact, may be the best indicators, and if so, then Alison Deming’s newest collection of poems, Rope, is a bellwether.
Rope not only brings together an amazing array of topics — the publisher’s summary above points those out — but weaves those topics into politics, passion, and perspective wholly uniqe and yet universal. Folks who have read Deming’s poetry (or prose) know of her curiosity for and allegiance to the workings of our natural world, and beyond. What makes Rope so delightful, and so important, is how Deming crafts that curiosity: there’s both caution and candor, verve and nuance — always elegant, often pointed.
I think this is particularly true with Deming’s longer poems — “Definition of Disaster,” which takes a sort of artist/scientist systems approach to the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina; “The Andrews Forest Quintet,” a series of five poems written while at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest; and perhaps most surprisingly (and stunningly) “Works and Days,” a 45-part prose poem that ranges as only a true artist’s mind can.
The worry with such a far-ranging collection is that it could come across as scattershot — too much of everything, not enough of anything. But that’s not the case with Rope, because even the shorter poems fit like a cog into the larger system of the book. And the longer poems help bound the overall set, so that reading Rope is like following a pathway that meanders but maintains direction. The direction is not just forward but up — the mountains, the sky, the stars.
If we live in interesting times — and we certainly do — then Rope is a worthy and essential guide.
I was asked recently to put together a brief comparison of sorts of writer’s conferences versus writing workshops around the idea of exposure to editors and publishers. This is what I came up with:
The view from the Wildbranch Writing Workshop: Craftsbury Common.
It seems to me that there are really two types of writer’s events — writing workshops and conferences about writing, the latter usually including a bookfair, publishers’ exhibits, or the like.
The biggest and perhaps best known example of the conference about writing is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference and bookfair, which usually draws at least 5,000 people. The panels cover a very wide range of writing topics. For example, I chaired a panel at the NYC AWP conference in early 2008 on “the future of environmental essay.” Large conferences such as these are excellent venues for attending panels of very well-known writers and visiting (and being overwhelmed by) publishers’ booths. I can’t recall the number of exhibitors at the bookfair, but it must be well over 400, I bet. In New York in 2008 and Denver in 2010, the journal I edit — Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments — did/will have a table. Visiting tables/booths and talking with editorial staff (and sometimes contributors) is the best way to learn about the publication short of actually purchasing it (or, in our case, visiting it online). Like smaller writer’s conferences, it’s not a venue for submitting work, but rather for identifying publications you’re interested in submitting your work to (whether individual literary journals or book publishers), talking with the editors to get a sense of what they’re interested in for upcoming issues, and rubbing elbows with other inquring writers.
Smaller conferences are not so overwhelming, and often provide a more intimate experience and opportunity for connecting even further with an editor. I think of this summer’s Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) biennial conference in Victoria, BC. With perhaps 400 attendees, the panels are smaller and last longer, the panels and events are tailored in this case to a specific set of literature — environmental literature and literary ecocriticism — and there are more opportunities for networking, especially with editors and contributors. The exhibitor can be much smaller; there were perhaps ten or twelve exhibitors at ASLE, Terrain.org among them.
At both settings, readings are offered. In the case of AWP, they’re offered both as part of the program and outside of the official event — dozens of them nightly, it seems. For example, in Denver in April 2010, Terrain.org is teaming up with Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability and Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing to host a reading not affiliated with AWP but which, we hope, will draw fans of those publications and people interested in place-based literature — even as it will conflict with one of AWP’s big poetry readings. At ASLE, on the other hand, it seemed appropriate not to schedule an off-site reading but rather to attend the two or three scheduled evening readings.
At the other end of the spectrum, though still related of course, are writing workshops. Staying in the environmental literature genre, I think here of the Wildbranch Writing Workshop held over a week each summer in northern Vermont. While one or two journals may be represented — Orion magazine (the Orion Society) is the primary sponsor, so always participates, and sometimes editors of other journals attend either as speakers or students (that was my experience in the summer of 2007) — there is little opportunity for editorial interaction unless it’s part of the workshop. At Wildbranch, however, that opportunity is a distinct and important part of the overall workshop experience: the year I attended, Orion’s editor-in-chief Chip Blake agreed to read every participant’s submission and provide individual feedback. That’s not common, I think, but is certainly valuable. What also isn’t common except at workshops like Wildbranch is the ability for students to meet with and really hang out with the instructors. I had the good fortune of spending time with Scott Russell Sanders and Sandra Steingraber, two writers/activists whose work I much admire. I’ve kept in touch with both of them. It’s true that as an editor myself I may have more opportunity to maintain our contact, but that the opportunity is there in the first place is pretty special. I doubt you dine at every meal with your instructor and other participants, including sponsoring magazine editors, at most workshops. But every writing workshop has some unique opportunity, I’d wager, and I suspect all of them develop a sense of community among the students that may continue well after the workshop.
So is there value in either or both of these approaches — the writer’s conference versus the writing workshop? Definitely. At the conference, the writer receives broad exposure to publications and access to an array of panels across genres but doesn’t receive instruction. The opportunities to meet publishers at booths/tables are many. At the workshop, the writer receives individual (small group, really) instruction and usually may sit on a few panels offered when the instructor-led workshops are not in session. Exposure to publishers and editors is limited, though. It’s really a question of what the writer is after. For me personally, they all offer benefits, but I can only go to so many larger writer’s conferences like AWP, especially if I’m not one of the presenters. And I could only attend a writing workshop (mainly due to cost and, at a full week often, time off) every now and then. But Wildbranch for me was incredibly beneficial and affirming. And the ASLE conference, held every other year, is an event I plan not to miss if I can help it. I don’t feel much community at AWP because of its vast size, but I definitely do at ASLE and Wildbranch.
Tucson Man Singled Out for Environmental Leadership Honoree Receives Audubon/Toyota TogetherGreen Fellowship
TogetherGreen website, at www.TogetherGreen.org.
A Tucson, Arizona man is the recipient of a national fellowship designed to advance the work of individuals with outstanding leadership potential to help shape a brighter environmental future.
Jose Marcos-Iga is one of 40 individuals nationwide selected as a 2009 TogetherGreen Fellow. The TogetherGreenFellowship offers specialized training in conservation planning and execution, the chance to work and share best practices with gifted conservation professionals, and assistance with project outreach and evaluation. Each Fellow receives $10,000 towards a community-focused project to engage local residents in conserving land, water and energy, and contributing to greater environmental health.
For his fellowship, Marcos-Iga will organize a series of workshops in the US-Mexico border region to train conservation practitioners and environmental educators in the use of humor, laughter, and play techniques to address “hot button” environmental issues that are not easily understood. The project provides an interdisciplinary approach to teaching environmental education that spans the fields of psychology, communication, creative writing, standup comedy, group facilitation, and cultural sensitivity. Educators taking part in the workshops will find the training helpful in their work with people of all ages.
Marcos-Iga is currently the Border Programs Coordinator for the Environmental Education Exchange working on bilingual programs capacity building and networking along the US-Mexico border.
“Jose is the kind of person who can make a real difference in the health of our environment and the quality of our future,” said Audubon President John Flicker. “Each of our TogetherGreen Fellows demonstrates exceptional environmental understanding and commitment, combined with tremendous potential to inspire and lead others. Together, they represent the talented and diverse leadership the environmental community will need to tackle the huge challenges and opportunities confronting us now and in the years to come.”
“Laughter and humor can help us connect and care, which is greatly important in today’s world, where gloom and doom can easily dominate the environmental discourse and disengage people. Thanks to TogetherGreen, I can take our ‘Laughter in EE’ project to the next level and make a real, positive impact on the environmental educators from the Southwest,” said Marcos-Iga.
Marcos-Iga has been affiliated with the Environmental Education Exchange since 2002. Half of the TogetherGreen Fellows come from within Audubon’s far-reaching national network; half channel their environmental efforts through other organizations.
Marco-Iga received a Bachelor’s degree in Communication and Information Sciences from the University of Monterrey (UDEM), a Master’s degree in Communication from the Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM), a Master’s degree in Natural Resources from the University of Arizona and is a PhD candidate in Natural resources with a minor in Environmental Education from the University of Arizona.
A distinguished advisory committee- composed of conservation professionals and experts in environmental education, communications, outreach, and conservation planning-selected the fellowship beneficiaries from a competitive pool of scores of highly qualified individuals. Qualified applicants must have at least six years of experience in conservation, environmental education, policy, or environmental issues, as demonstrated through current and past work experience, academic studies related to conservation, and/or volunteer work. Candidates must have a passion for conservation, the desire to learn and grow, and demonstrate a proven ability in reaching previously unengaged audiences.
“We must engage the best and brightest leaders representing the broadest and most diverse communities in this country to solve our ever more complex conservation challenges,” said Diane Wood, President, National Environmental Education Foundation. “TogetherGreen is a creative program that uncovers such leaders, nurtures their talents, supports their dedication to conservation and holds them up to inspire others to follow.”
Yesterday I had the privelage of having lunch with Bill Keener, a senior attorney with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency focusing on borderland issues. He was down in Tucson from San Francisco. Bill, writing as William Keener, has three poems in the current issue of Terrain.org that you shouldn’t miss: read and listen to them here.
We were hoping that Alison Hawthorne Deming, who also has poems in this issue, would be able to join us. But alas, she couldn’t make it. I think they’d get along splendidly — they have a lot in common. And that strikes me as true of many poets who likewise write of science and environment. What is it that draws us together? Ideology, passion, scientific understanding, constant pursuit of truth and justice, a love for art and an acknowledgement that art and science are fundamentally linked? That’s why Terrain.org resounds, I think. It’s about nexus. In this case, the nexus between art and science, environment and humanity — the places real and virtual we all coexist, even if we don’t completely understand them.
In October, just after appearing at Terrain’s launch event at the UA Poetry Center, David Rothenberg went off for three weeks aboard a hundred year old Dutch schooner to sail around the Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen with fourteen artists on a project known as The Arctic Circle, www.thearcticcircle.org
October 6th, Longyearbyen 78.2° N, 16°E
Last Sunday I walked the lonely streets of Tucson, city in the desert. It was a hundred and five degrees and no one else dared go out. One week later I am 78° N in the Northernmost place in the world reached by regular air service. It is 15° and snowing heavily. The white mountains have that looming arctic shape, where the base melds into the sea and the summit dissolves into cloud, with the middle stages of black on white like some giant illegible hieroglyphic. The world is like this, we are privileged to be able to leap from one climate to the next with ease. It is always much bigger than we are, and impervious in its beauty. That is the terror of the sublime.
In between I stopped to climb the marble slopes of the new Oslo Opera House, a great white building forged out on the shore of the most populous of Norway’s fjords, a spot always raw and under construction. It is meant to be the North’s answer to the great curved shell’s of Sydney’s opera, and with its white blocks of carefully hewn rock it does not disappoint. It is an artificial mountain by the shore from whose summit one can see distant real mountains, a pilgrimage site of the future, when this city will one day be beautiful.
Opera House
We are building a world that will never compete with the vastness of Arctic ice. The names of the folding coastline are unpronounceable and long, the archipelago of Svalbard is full of towering peaks and unreachable canyons hardly ever touched by human feet. It seems endlessly beyond the range of our ability to impact but it is all in danger. The bears and whales grow toxic as their food concentrates all we have dumped into the environment, we are taught to weigh sadness as we learn all this beauty is melting away.
But nature remains more than anything we can do to it. One hundred, one thousand, one million years. It is nothing in the grand scale of time. We are fourteen artists sailing on a hundred year old schooner into rough and windy seas, with as many computers, cameras, recorders, devices, none of which can capture anything of the rich majesty of the world. We are supposed to possess special eyes, ears, and vision to be able, in our own ways, to represent some fragment of this beauty to help change the way people may see. It is an impossible task, but it is the least we can do since we have come this far.
October 8th, Fourteenth of July Bay, Krossfjorden, Spitsbergen 79.2° N 12°E
We are fourteen artists, two scientists, and a crew of four sailing as close to the North Pole pack ice as we can get away with. Aboard the M/S Noorderlicht, a hundred-year old Dutch schooner, we left Longyearbyen one week ago in the Norwegian territory of Svalbard, the most northerly point in the world with regular air service, for several weeks traveling the Arctic through open sea and sheltered bays, stopping along the way to respond to the landscape in uniquely artistic ways.
Ship and Land
We have been out two nights, and already we have met a phenonemon of nature that cannot be captured in an image. The aurora borealis is a beautiful piece of natural performance art cannot be easily filmed or photographed. A time-lapse photo reveals only fuzzy colors, and a moving image cannot get enough light to capture the dynamic strangeness of it all. The Northern lights have been painted as hanging, shimmering curtains of multicolored fire, and old engravings show an imaginary fierce luminosity that wants to leap from the page into our minds. Computer enhanced contemporary images recreate the experience, but they too seem unreal, like motion-capture animation.
Rarely has a boat like this had so many hard-drives and up-to-the-minute cameras, with hundreds of images snapped and recorded, set immediately on to the great download of analysis and processing. The artists are all at work, puzzling, thinking, figuring out how to get beyond the two extremes: pure documentation, and blatant irony. “I will take a picture of me on the ice in a black suit, with flashlights on an armature illuminating my face,” says Tomas from Croatia. “It is an ego trip, I know.” A statement, a point. We don’t want to be seen as tourists, but of course we are tourists. Art tourists at the end of the world, trying to describe what will always be greater than any description.
I am afraid of voicing my own rather conservative musician views. It matters not to me what is or is not art, but what is good art or bad. Or more easily, what is better of worse. You gonna wear a black suit on the white ice? All right, tell me the better or worse ways of wearing that suit, surrounded by a crown of flashlights. Wear that suit like you mean it, not to make me laugh. It is too beautiful out here to laugh at, but I am always ready to laugh with you, not at you, or your work.
It is the aurora that makes me more than smile, but open my mouth into an astonished “O.” I have seen it many times before but it is never less beautiful or surprising than before. We can make art out of it but we cannot ever replay it. The images we snap and flash can only be the starting point. Better to think of auroras and set up one’s own arctic lights of the night, as did light installation artist Raphaele Shirley:
Light installation by Raphaele Shirley.
I remember the eighteenth century, and the notion of the sublime. That quality in nature that leaves us in awe because it is always beyond the fact of our gaze, the extent of our reach. We are as small as it is great, as we seem hardly to make any mark upon this grand arctic expanse. The sublime, said the philosophers, is not as fine as the beautiful, because it impresses us because of how giant it is, and how impossible to touch. Beauty, instead, must be something more, something we can choose to contemplate, rather than be always humbled by.
And yet this giant beauty today seems ours to pollute, to warm, to melt out of existence. We must honor those facts of nature that are greater than any ability of us to destroy, or ignore. The force of the wilderness smacks us across the face, and its grandeur must always burn, in our hearts, in our thoughts.
October 9th, Sallyhamnen, 79.7° N 11.2°E
Today I played my soprano saxophone aboard the zodiac as we motored close to the whiteblue tongue of a glacier. The scene was being filmed by Italian artist Andrea Galvani for a giant photograph he would later print at a gigantic size from an old 4 x 5 single-load film camera. “This digital image,” he says, “is like a Polaroid for me.” I was wearing his Muji raincoat because it looked much more cool than my own high-tech gear. Everything was black. The boatmen lay down on the floor of the zodiac so we wouldn’t be seen, making it look like I was out there all alone. A wire ran from my saxophone into the sea to make it look like I was playing right into the water, down to the hydrophone to broadcast my sound to any whales who might be listening below. I have done this many times before but this time, as winter approaches, there are no whales in the fjord.
David Rothenberg plays in the fjord.
The lone saxophone tones echoed off the stark mountain walls. Once I figured out the length of the reverberation I could time my phrases so a minimalist rhythm could be formed by the bouncing of the sounds off the two mountains. The echo turned time into space and made this one little instrument beat into the sides of the landscape, a golden reflection dancing off the descending light. Snow continued to fall, beginning to collect on the bell of the horn and the floor of the boat. The photographer was shouting instructions at me from the kayak as it faded away into the mist. All became soon invisible, I forgot where I was and who this music was for. A fulmar shrieked. A bear roared in the distance. He climbed into the still green water and started to swim.
October 10th, Moffen Island, 80°N, 14.5°E
From this completely flat island on the horizon we see nothing, as if we are deposited in some alien sea. It is strangely warm and moist, nothing like the endless winter one might imagine at the end of the road of darkness. Through September it is forbidden to land on this island in case breeding walruses and seabirds might be disturbed. By October the law permits us, and it is now possible to walk right up to huddled walruses and tap them on the shoulder, inject them with tranquilizers, and take a sample of something. But we’re not scientists, so we don’t do that, though we do approach close enough to feel their eyes looking right at us, squinting, trying to see something of interest. Eye of the walrus—doesn’t sound as romantic as ‘eye of the whale,’ and I don’t know how humans have been changed or touched by it.
The tiny human forms traipse across the white landscape, looking for something, as always, an idea, a creative spark, a mood borne out loneliness that might find a place in the civilized world after we return.
Heini Aho, a Finnish artist, attaches her video camera to a tripod on the white windswept plain of the Reinsdyrflya, a flat expanses surrounded by the distant white peaks beyond the Liefdefjord, or Fjord of Love. Then she poses in front of the camera and rapidly dresses and undresses herself with piles of hats, scarves, coats, gloves, and fleeces. When she’s down to a black turtleneck and balaclava she looks like some kind of arctic ninja performing some strange ritual that is not explained.
Finnish artist Heini Aho.
On the islands flat snow-covered plain are old glass bottles with clear liquid inside that hasn’t frozen. Vodka? Turpentine? We can’t smell it, we can hardly tell. There are spheres the size of soccer balls, made of plastic, metal, buoys for fishing nets. “Once I picked up one of those,” says our leader Jan, “and instead I found it was a human skull.” If you die up here no one will come to take your body out.
October 14th, sailing toward Magdalena Fjord, 79.6°N, 11°E
The bell rings on deck, that means there’s something to see. “Ayeaah,” says the captain, usually a man of few words, “seven polar bears eating an old whale carcass. I have only seen something like this a few times in all my journeys in the North.”
Every artist rushes to our cabins, grabs our latest-model cameras, and runs up on deck. The bears don’t seem interested in us, that slimy whale backbone looks so delicious. We can smell it easily a few hundred yards away, it’s probably been there for months. “Ooohhh…” someone says, “it looks like something out of a Matthew Barney film.”
Polar bear through camera lens and binoculars.
We watch the bears eating and playing for hours. It’s impossible to pull our eyes away. The raw reality of nature holds us transfixed. A couple of us remember Werner Herzog’s line in Grizzly Man, where the great director announces, coldly, “People think nature is beautiful, but I do not agree. To me it is nothing but a realm of cruelty, survival, and the relentless search for food.” With his beautiful documentaries Herzog shows that notion is just a pose, for he loves nature and has truly succeeded in revealing it in art, cutting far beyond the clichés and the preset stories of the wild we are all so used to.
Polar bears eating whale carcass.
Sure, I could tell you them all: the sea was rough, the cameras and computers were pitching to the floor. Wine glasses were breaking, milk spilled onto the floor. Waves from the sea sprayed us head to toe in the tiny zodiac as we made rough we landings on shore. The light is indescribable, the snowy peaks stretched into the distance forever. The immense loneliness zeros straight in on the sublime, where the land is great because we are so small.
I tell you those things and all of them are true. But we are artists, not tourists, so it should not be enough to be impressed by walruses and polar bears. But we all love the polar bears! Their bloody faces smile as they chew on rancid whale meat. You don’t become an artist by denying any tourist instincts. We all want to see and love the world. Just as artists in the Age of Exploration were the only ones to offer up images grand and graphic enough to show people back home what the far reaches of the globe can offer, today we must cut through a world saturated with images and stories to see if there can still be a fresh way of expressing one’s experiences on the journey, careening through the sea and back and forth from the frozen, empty land.
Oct. 18th, Ny Ålesund, Arctic Science Village
In Ny Ålesund, a former mining village that is now an international center for climate research, most of the two hundred researchers and technicians have left for the season. But at the Alfred Wegener Polar Institute, a German engineer still remains, for a whole year in this inaccessible outpost, to repeat the same experiments every day. In one he releases a large white weather balloon, each day at 1pm, which rises and drifts into the stratosphere before exploding when it gets too high, but not before transmitting essential data from its disposable radio which will never be found. Then at night he shoots a high energy laser beam straight up into the clouds, of such power that even a tiny fraction of its bright beam is diffused back through the cloud cover and can be registered by the naked eye. The beam bounces through the building inside a complex and irregular rectilinear box, down to the floor off a large telescope mirror, then straight up through a hole in the roof. The green ray heading skyward looks like it is strong enough to reach the moon.
Ny Ålesund, a former mining village, now an international center for climate research.
The German engineer speaks extremely precisely. He will not answer any questions around which he has even the slightest doubt. “Why do the stars here in the North flicker with such visible multiple spectra of color?” I ask, “shimmering from red then to green and to blue.”
“I know of what you speak,” he nods. “But I do not know enough astronomy to say anything more.”
“And what,” I point, “is that big wooden contrabass case doing next to the laser mirror, the beaten-up box that says ‘Berliner Philharmonische Orchester’ on it?”
“Oh,” he smiles. “Usually there is a instrument in there, but not right now. It is not mine.”
Oct. 19th, Barentsburg
If you think it is strange there is a Russian town on Spitsbergen, remember that this land is not exactly part of Norway. It really is a kind of no-man’s territory, not subject to any taxation, where historically a man could arrive from anywhere and stake a claim. The American Longyear founded Longyearbyen, the Russians had Pyramiden, now abandoned, and Barentsburg, still going strong. Long before climate change grabbed our attention the Arctic had tremendous strategic importance, and the Germans bombed all of it in World War II. They even had one far and remote weather station that was the final place the Nazis surrendered in September 1945.
Whereas Ny Ålesund is a curious modern science town of satellite dishes, nationalistic research buildings from nations as diverse as China, India, Germany and France, Barentsburg looks like a little slice of Siberia. You walk up to the city up hundreds of carefully constructed wooden steps, to emerge on a plateau with crumbling concrete buildings, most built in the sixties through eighties but generally looking much older. The faded grandeur of the Soviet time is out in full force, monuments everywhere you look. To the glory of the coal miner! To the arctic socialist explorer hand in hand with a polar bear! A concrete apartment building with a giant brick design of a Russian country maid.
Strangely, there are murals throughout the town (of perhaps 600 Russians, with room for about a thousand more) of green and leafy summer scenes, images of a landscape so far removed from where we now stand that it is hard to understand why anyone would want to paint them here. Is this some kind of wry Arctic joke? Or are these billboards advertising the land all the residents will sometime soon go home to?
Barentsburg, a Russian town in Norway.
The bartender at the one foreigners’ hotel smiles when I ask her, “how long have you been here?”
“My term is two years. The pay is good. But then I am getting out.”
In the middle of the night after hours of vodka in the bright fluorescent bar we are laughing in the dark, running down those perilous wood steps at top speed, slipping on rail tracks in the tunnels that lead from the mine. Around a corner we spy three coal-faced miners, returning from work. All of a sudden life here seems no longer a party, but risky, dirty work. We all go silent for a moment. But soon we start laughing again and run back to our boat.
Bar in Barentsburg.
Oct. 17th, Blomstrand halvøya, Krossfjorden
In 1910 Ernest Mansfield was convinced that this was going to be the site of the greatest marble quarry in the world, so he set up the Northern Exploration Company to cut all the stone out. He named the spot New London. Some of his machines remain right on the rails, having never even been used. The whole project fell apart, there was nothing worth taking.
The more we experience this distance the place, the less it seems it’s a wilderness. Spitsbergen is the warmest place in the Arctic, because it’s the end of the gulf stream, so much of the sea surrounding remains ice-free most of the year. Already by 1700 the Dutch had killed all the whales here, and after that came trappers, hunters, miners, still trying to extract something useful out of the landscape. What might remain most useful today is strategy—a few years ago a cable was laid all the way from Norway under the sea, bringing fast communication to the outside world. There are now hundreds of scientists stationed up here keeping track of what will happen to a warming world.
Blomstrand halvøya, Krossfjorden
The mining sputters on, the locals still hang onto it with pride. Greenpeace was up here just before we arrived demanding that the coal mines shut down. Of course they are wasteful, hopeless, destined to fail like the quarry at Blomstrand. Coal mining has no place in the Arctic, no place anywhere. If we work hard enough we’ll soon find better sources of energy: from the sun, the wind, the waves.
Is that a workable dream? Spitsbergen is full of the graves of dreams that failed. The beauty of the place is a success, it cannot be tamed. Or is that only because we cannot see deep into history?
Oct. 20th
On shore beneath a glacier the wind whips up around us, the most furious storm on the trip. It is snow, it is rain, something in between that cuts the skin. The artists are making their final gestures in the field. Heini Aho is trying to build a final fire sheltered beneath chunks of ice. Willy Somma is running all around, jumping onto icebergs, photographing herself in flight. Some of us are huddled in a snow cave, one of us, Amy Wiita, is actually swimming, in a dry suit. The wind whips up, snow is all over our faces, and we can’t believe that soon we will be going home and this whole confined world, this small group tossed together in the swaying seas to observe, to wonder, to create, will all be disbanded, and we will have to figure out how to hold onto this journey back in our usual lives of warmth and of light.
Ice fire.
Artists.
Ship and snow.
David Rothenberg.
David Rothenberg is the author of Thousand Mile Song and Why Birds Sing. He is now busy making music out of the sounds of crackling ice.
Some music made out of the sounds of the ship hitting ice (Ice Baby):
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Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments explores the nexus between the built and natural environments through two theme-based issues per year. Online since 1997, we publish editorials, poetry, essays, fiction, articles, reviews, interviews, the ARTerrain gallery, the UnSprawl case study, and the new To Know a Place multimedia feature.
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