By Aaron Gilbreath

My name is Aaron Gilbreath. I’m an essayist and journalist based in Portland, Oregon, and I’m in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign for my current book project, Crowded: Portrait of Life on a Teeming Planet.

Why Crowding?

Photo by VinothChandar via photopin cc.

Be it sitting on a plane near a screaming baby, or brainstorming ways to organize your office cubicle, crowding touches most everyone’s life, because density is one of modernity’s defining issues. Even if you’ve never tried to articulate it, spatial requirements – of room, of silence, privacy and calm – form part of our definition of “the good life.” How far apart do you need to be from other people to find peace? How far apart do your living room walls need to be to feel comfortable? Even when we’re unaware of its influence, roominess is a condition, and the degree to which we have it determines livability. My book will argue that we need to treat overcrowding with the same gravity as other social and ecological issues, and take steps to manage it in a humane way that minimizes crowds’ dangers while capitalizing on their benefits. In the process, Crowded will test the counterintuitive principle that the smaller our home, the happier our life.

With the story driven by characters, scenes, action and dialogue, and rooted in solid reporting, Crowded qualifies as narrative nonfiction. The book is one urbanite’s vision of human history through the story of the crowd. The problem is: to write the proposal, I needed to do some preliminary reporting, and that required travel, and funding.

Why New York and Tokyo?

As the world becomes more urban, the size of many urban residences shrinks. Some are tight but serviceable, like the hundred-square-foot units in Hong Kong’s oldest public housing building. Some are inhumane, like the forty-square-foot subdivided rooms that an estimated 100,000 Hong Kong workers inhabit, spaces so small that The Atlantic says “they can only be photographed from above.” Other newer units in cities like Paris, Tokyo, and San Francisco are elegant and self-contained. These are the increasingly popular “micro-apartments.” Next to Michael Wolf’s photos of China’s residential high rises, micro-apartments’ compact interiors, which range from 150 to 400 square feet, provide one of the iconic images of our time, the embodiment of human resilience in the face of stifling limitations.

Chic efficiencies already exist or are under construction in Seattle, Hong Kong, Vancouver, San Diego, Chicago, Australia, and Montreal. At the end of 2013, construction will begin on New York City’s first micro-apartment building, My Micro NY, on East 27th. With a move-in date of 2015, the pilot project is part of Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC campaign, a sweeping push to equip the City for its changing economy, aging infrastructure, lack of affordable one- and two-person housing, and the million additional residents expected to arrive by 2030. Up to a third of them will be single. The architectural experiment could revolutionize real estate, demographics, and urban planning in the City and set nationwide precedents. The world will be watching.

Learn more about Aaron’s important project at:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2116677151/crowded-portrait-of-life-on-a-teeming-planet

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By Scott Russell Sanders

When I speak with audiences about our responsibility to bear in mind the needs of the generations that will come after us, a century and more in the future, I am often asked why we should care about people who do not even exist. The first time I encountered this question, I had to puzzle before answering. Assuming that those unborn future generations bear no genetic link to ourselves—as the vast majority of them will not, even if we happen to have children—there is no biological reason for caring whether they flourish or suffer. Nor is there any logical reason to care for them, since the quality of their lives can have no direct effect on our own well-being.

What I realized, as I pondered this challenge from the audience, is that the impulse to care about the fate of unborn generations arises from my sense of taking part in the human lineage. We are born into a world filled with blessings as well as curses inherited from previous generations—mathematics and nuclear weapons, antibiotics and racism, art and war; and we die passing on a world either enriched or diminished by our having lived. Our big brains enable us to remember and learn about the past, and to imagine the consequences of our actions. A failure to recognize our participation in this human lineage is to waste our distinctive gifts.

Hunting for Hope: A Father’s Journey by Scott Russell Sanders (Beacon Press, 1998)

I feel a deep sense of gratitude for the goods we’ve received from previous generations, including the bounty and resilience of nature they have taken pains to preserve. Likewise, I feel a deep sense of regret over the legacy of damage those generations have passed on to us—from slavery, sexism, genocide, pollution, and the like. The regret prompts me to reduce the damage I might cause by my own way of life, and to resist the most damaging aspects of my society. The gratitude prompts me to help preserve the sources of our well-being—clean water and air, biodiversity, public lands, knowledge, art, democracy, among many others—and to add whatever new goods I can fashion with my limited time and talents.

Caring about the fate of unborn generations—strangers who exist, as of now, only in our imagination—is an essential part of what it means to be human.

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This is the second cross-post between Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments and the University of Arizona Institute of the Environment’s Proximities. The first was a conversation between Simmons B. Buntin and Megan Kimble.

Rafe Sagarin is a marine ecologist and environmental policy analyst at the University of Arizona. In both his science and policy work, Sagarin connects basic observations of nature to issues of broad societal interest, including conservation biology, protecting public trust resources, and making responses to terrorism and other security threats more adaptable.  Dr. Sagarin is a recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and has recently published two books, Learning from the Octopus (Basic Books, 2012) and Observation and Ecology: Broadening the Scope of Science to Understand a Complex World (Island Press, 2012), which show how nature observation—when extended across large scales and enhanced with both new technologies and greater deference to traditional knowledge sources—is revealing profound new insights about our dynamic social and ecological world. He was a Geological Society of America Congressional Science Fellow in the office of U.S. Representative (and later U.S. Secretary of Labor) Hilda Solis. He has taught ecology and environmental policy at Duke University, California State University Monterey Bay, Stanford University, University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Arizona. His research has appeared in Science, Nature, Conservation Biology, Ecological Monographs, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security Affairs, and other leading journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the editor, with Terence Taylor, of the volume Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World (2008, University of California Press).

Eric Magrane is poet-in-residence at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, a Carson Fellow, and a research assistant at University of Arizona’s Institute of the Environment, where he works on art, science, and environment and writes Proximities. He is currently pursing a Ph.D. in Geography and Development at the University of Arizona, developing a method of poetic geography that blends critical-creative practice with human geography and environmental research. He has been an artist in residence in three U.S. national parks and is the creator and curator of A Poetic Inventory of Saguaro National Park, which gathered 80 writers to craft pieces based on species in the Park for the 2011 National Park Service and National Geographic Society BioBlitz. He is also the founding editor of Spiral Orb, an experiment in permaculture poetics, and his book Shadow Lift is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in late 2014.

What follows is a partial transcript of the wide-ranging conversation, as well as video clips from their discussion:

Eric Magrane: Rafe, you write and speak about observation, most pointedly in your book Observation and Ecology, with Aníbal Pauchard. I’d like to discuss the way that observation interacts as a hinge between science—and particularly environmental science—as a way of seeing and understanding the world, and art as a way of seeing.

Rafe Sagarin: Absolutely. Observation is at the core of so many things we do, especially art and science. It’s almost so much at the core of science that it’s forgotten how important it is. The primacy that observation has to everything that we know—we’ve almost gotten too clever by half and think we could skip that deep observational step. Of course, all artists implicitly understand that they need to be really good observers of the world first, before they can start translating those observations to something they can appreciate. Sometimes in science we drill down way too far too fast before we understand observationally the whole context of what we’re looking at.

Eric Magrane: It seems like there are intersections between where one starts, as well—whether one begins with a hypothesis or a question that will guide the way that you look at things. Or sometimes in artistic ways of engaging with the world, it doesn’t always begin from a specific question or a discrete category that one is already organizing the world in, right? It seems like the way that you speak about observation addresses this stepping back and being attentive to what is actually happening in the world rather than going in already saying—within this space, within this marine ecosystem, for example—I know exactly how I organize this world already. It upsets the way that we make knowledge and has openings for new ways of understanding the ordering of the world and trying different arrangements.

Rafe Sagarin: Exactly. There’s been a lot of shifting of this in science. The early naturalist-explorers were wide-open observers. Darwin didn’t go to the Galapagos with a hypothesis in mind about evolution. He observed and observed for years, even when he got back, and eventually came out with this hypothesis and looked back at the data to see how it fit. What happened especially in the second half of the 20th century is that science got really more and more pressure, to this day, to define itself by being able to ask a hypothesis and then test that hypothesis. In the way we’ve made that process more efficient, it’s almost like you need to know—in order to get funded for your science—exactly what your hypothesis is going to be beforehand. Otherwise, you’re accused of going on a fishing expedition when in reality you’re never going to come up with a good hypothesis until you’ve done a lot of observing as broadly as possible before you even think about what’s the most appropriate question here.

Eric Magrane: How do you know which scales to observe? There are connections here to citizen science or engaging the public in bringing in multiple frames of observation and observers looking at different objects.

Rafe Sagarin: There’s really no one right way to determine what scale you start at. I think it’s really determined by what it is you’re interested in. But you do need to have the cognizance that there are multiple scales out there, so that you’re not blinding yourself. So for example if you’re just looking at satellite data of something, you may be missing some important processes that are going on right down at the ground. And if you’re just looking at one local site, you might be missing how that connects to the whole picture. The beauty of being an observer in today’s world is that you can move across scales. Technologically speaking we’re able to observe like never before—observe the entire earth—but also we can do so in terms of our networked world we live in. Even if you’re not the person who can do the observations at the very local scale, you can connect with people—through citizen science programs for example or through networks of scientists—who are observing at different places. We have kind of an unprecedented opportunity and ability to observe at all kinds of scales. But that doesn’t suggest there is one scale you should necessarily start on.

The anthropocene and reimagining the conversation with Rafe Sagarin and Eric Magrane.
From Environment UA on Vimeo.

Eric Magrane: One of these hinges between art and science, and what art or poetics may bring to ways of imagining science is in how it offers a way to engage with place. For example, in ecopoetics, and the conception of ecopoetics as a site, there’s a bit of a freedom or a different sort of attention that can happen through this poetic frame rather than an analytical hypothesis-driven frame. There’s a freedom to migrate across different places. For example, a poet can juxtapose the great Pacific garbage patch and a hotel room in San Francisco. Or, as poet Marcella Durand writes in her essay “The Ecology of Poetry”:

Association, juxtaposition, and metaphor are tools that the poet can use to address larger systems. The poet can legitimately juxtapose kelp beds with junkyards, or to get more intricate, she or he can reflect on the water reservoir system for a large city by utilizing the linguistic structure of repetitive water-associated words in a poem.

By putting things together and making these odd combinations that don’t necessarily work in a logical scientific way of knowing the world, we might speak to something of the mesh of materiality that we’re working with now.

Rafe Sagarin: I think that feeling that scientists can’t jump across boundaries, in the way that you describe that poetry does, has really been imposed upon us by the institution of science. With the rise of molecular biology in the mid-20th century, the idea is that we have cut science and complex systems down into smaller and smaller parts. But if you look at the early scientists, naturalists, and ecologists, people like Ed Ricketts, they were first of all incredibly inspired in their work by poets like Robinson Jeffers, who was very impactful on Ricketts. Ricketts was a marine ecologist, but also a marine ecologist who wanted to connect what he looked at to questions about warfare and conflict and overcoming conflict—and in fact breaking through conflict, which was an idea that he took directly from Jeffers’ poem “Roan Stallion.” Early on, scientists didn’t see these boundaries. Then we had a period where everything was divided up, and now we’re realizing that in order to understand complex systems we really have to move freely across these boundaries again. So poetry has always in fact from its start guided science in a way, and there are many, many examples of that. Now, we can take a lesson from that kind of moving across boundaries and apply it to the kinds of things scientists want to do. It’s only really an institutional illusion that science has to be constructed within very narrow constraints and along a kind of linearized pathway. That’s not at all an actually organic part of what science is or could be.

Eric Magrane: I think of the geographer Alexander von Humboldt, who was a mix of naturalist, explorer, and scientist and really brought a sense of aesthetics to science. At the same time, the disciplinary boundaries that have been built over the last couple hundred years have led to some interesting and very important things as well. One of the things that we have to be careful about when thinking about migrating across different fields of knowledge or different boundaries is that at the same time we talk about being able to do this interdisciplinary work, we need to acknowledge that there are these disciplines for a reason that have built all of these specific processes that engage with specific questions. It’s important to follow a nuanced engagement with that interdisciplinary—or across boundaries—space.

Rafe Sagarin: Even within the kind of bounded science that we’ve gotten used to, it’s inevitable that thoughts of aesthetics get pulled into it. People talk about a beautiful proof or an elegant experiment that may be happening within a narrowly focused science or mathematics. It’s inevitable that people want to bring in these aesthetic values to what they’re doing. I think that it’s a natural force there.

Adaptive solutions, biomimicry, and multiple perspectives with Rafe Sagarin and Eric Magrane.
From Environment UA on Vimeo.

Eric Magrane: To get back to observation and scientists being at their root observers, that work has to come from close observation of the world, artists also talk about that. To come from a place where one observes that space and is really attentive to what’s actually there. At that—I hesitate to say level—but space of observation, there’s really not a difference between science and art and the way of seeing. Maybe it becomes a difference at a certain point when we decide what we are going to do with what is observed. At that point our choices shift it into this different knowledge frame of how we make meaning of what is out in the world outside of the observer.

Rafe Sagarin: Absolutely. I think about all processes in life—in a person’s life, in biology itself—as recursive. They build off their past states. And there’s this seed to any recursive process, whether it’s a mathematical spiral or a spiral on a nautilus shell. For an observer of the world, whether they become an artist or a scientist, that seed is that observational skill. And when I talk to my favorite scientists and naturalists, they all have that early seed in childhood—and I think of my own experiences of really just getting out into nature as much as I could when I was a kid. They did have that combined element in this nascent form that you spoke to—to me it was about art and it was about playing and it was about scientifically looking at things, experimenting with the hermit crabs I’d find in the tide pools and things like that. All of it wrapped up into one at that point, and then as my experiences expanded and went in different directions, they continued to touch on all of these things. When I go out into tidepools now, it’s also still about science and art and play and enjoyment and sharing it with other people. But I may have had more a focus in one area in any given time. This kind of spiraling process allows you to touch on the full scope of things. It’s actually an expansive process. I find myself coming back to the same areas I started at as a little kid but with this expanded knowledge base or expanded viewpoint. I actually see it as starting with a core that includes all those elements and expands outward from that, even though we may perceive it as becoming narrower.

Eric Magrane: I think play is key in that idea of expanding outward—which in some contexts would be described as looking toward the macro—and then looking inward toward the micro, especially when you use the image of the spiral, it’s kind of the same thing. What’s out there might be very close to what’s in here versus somewhere in between. For example, I recently co-curated an exhibit called Curating the Cosmos in conjunction with the Association of American Geographers conference in Los Angeles and we brought a number of different artists together, including Paul Mircoha from Tumamoc, who did a series of images for the exhibit that included real close images of lichen on the rocks from Tumamoc with images of space mixed into them. Having these connected aesthetics of the out-there of space with the in-here close up of lichen—and that movement of being able to focus closely and open up this wide field of vision at the same time—is something beautiful. I also wonder if it may help us to re-imagine the way that we exist as a species here on the earth among other species.

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By Mike Medberry

Caxton Press, 2012

Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

On the Dark Side of the Moon
By Mike Medberry
Caxton Press, 2012
ISBN 978-0-87004-513-4
166 pages

Mike Medberry has written a slim volume of a memoir that’s a victory in many ways. This environmentalist and writer—in his first book—offers to the reader a story of debility and recovery, a journey he experienced following a stroke in April of 2000 that left him helplessly lying on the rocks of Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve. But On the Dark Side of the Moon: A Journey Toward Recovery is more than just a book about a man struggling to regain health.

This is a memoir with a number subplots. Medberry is first of all an environmentalist with a long history of activism and land conservation. That Craters of the Moon was a piece of land he’d started exploring in order to examine further preservation possibilities makes this story part land-conservation history. That Medberry’s father died from the aftermath of a stroke when Medberry was a young teen deepens the felt sadness around a familial illness. That Medberry got married and divorced to a good friend in the rehabilitation period adds a love story to the drama. Then enter Camas, a pound-recovery and untrained Brittany who wreaks canine havoc in Mike’s life, a life already filled with relearning the simplest tasks: we’ve got a dog-helps-man-helps-dog story. Lastly, perhaps the most fascinating underlying thread is Medberry as writer: an MFA-trained writer relearning the basic fundamentals of his most prized tool: language.

Medberry’s published this first book, and that gives away part of the story before we open the book: he’s recovered to a great extent, likely more than any stroke patient might hope. This story isn’t ghost-written, and that alone speaks to a recovery filled with hard work, persistence, and—given the unknowns Medberry teaches us around brain damage and stroke recovery—likely a lot of luck. We’re taken in this tale through the ambiguities and mysteries of the brain, and Medberry pares open the unknowns. Even a conversation in 2001—in the recovery stage—with neurologist and author Antonio Damasio reveals the questions through the doctor’s metaphor of the brain as a plumbing system. Small-pipe damage far from the central system hampers the entirety of the system less than damage to a larger pump or pipe. Compensation is possible. Firm answers are only guessable, observable as symptom or lack of.

Medberry tells us of his language struggles both through his own expression and but also through the reflection of other’s impressions, and even as we realize a recovery’s occurred, it’s at times painful to read about the process. An early draft of this book went a professor-friend of the author’s who responded in part about the difficulties of commenting due to: “…The stroke itself, in particular its resulting and continuing verbal disabilities, which, I’m sorry to have to say, do show up here in the handling of language and sentence structure.” Other language issues are memory-oriented. At a follow up meeting weeks after the stroke, Medberry tells his doctor about his three children. “Mike, you don’t have three children,” reminds his mother. Finally there’s the production of language to communicate. Medberry quotes early letters:

Oh, well hay about?

What about this? I wonder wou woulder whae would. 

I really wonderd wihous Good

Gold I just forbord adoud this.

One comes to realize that the book itself is object and process, the history and the exercise of recovery and in a way this makes it intriguing.  It’s impossible not to consider the production of the writing as we also process the content.

Healing is the overarching metaphor of the book: for the body, the soul, the land within and around Craters. First: it’s hard to imagine Medberry lying on the hot black lava rock of Craters for 7 hours before a helicopter is able to airlift him to medical care, but that’s where the book starts us. It’s enough to make a person cringe, let alone any EMT or medical student who knows that for brain injury or trauma, a few minutes can be critical to a positive recovery.

It’s fascinating too that the stroke occurs in the very park Medberry will cheer for as President Bill Clinton in November of 2000 signs the proclamation that makes final the expansion increasing the protected land to 737,000 acres, “nearly 14 times its previous size.” The history of the monument and preserve is fascinating, and it essentially entails Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt sidestepping a Republican Congress by using the Antiquities Act of 1906 to allow a sitting President to declare a national monument via a proclamation. Medberry offers this concession to the process about the role of environmentalists: “…we’re better at forcing issues than resolving them. We argue and spit and never seem pleased.” He goes on to explain that the magic that happened at Craters occurred because of successful compromise by ranchers and environmentalists. One might say everyone got a piece of what they wanted. There are land management lessons to be learned here.

The last sections of the memoir take us through additional pieces of Medberry’s healing. His marriage, his struggles to continue to speak more and more normally, and his ventures back into the land with his new companion, Camas. There’s a stubbornness here that’s interesting, intriguing, and perhaps unexpected. Medberry can’t seem to live in the same town as the woman he married, and he also seems to act willfully, not in a malicious way, but in a vital way. Long hikes back in the wilderness from which he was rescued, even one where he almost loses Camas. A honeymoon in Hawaii where he runs out of money and has to rely on his new bride. One senses a stubbornness in Medberry that perhaps was a significant and needed part in his recovery, too.

Could anything in the memoir be done differently? Maybe. There’s a feeling that it could be longer, that so much information could be mined more deeply. We don’t get to meet Merritt as much as we’d like to. Medberry’s mother as well, a woman with a fascinating and challenging background. One senses, too, the chapter on the land management of Crater’s is strangely distinct, not woven through the story as well as it could be. However, these are small points, and perhaps not fair to demand of an author who’s so amazingly recovered from this stroke, this massive life event that had the potential to take his life.

This is a memoir about remembering, healing, and moving forward in a number of ways both for Medberry and the land, Craters, and, to have brought us to this stage of healing on so many levels, Medberry, as he quotes from the famous Merwin poem, has had “to speak / in a forgotten language.”

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By Derrick Jensen

The dominant culture is murdering the planet, and there really isn’t a prayer of stopping this murder so long as so many people continue to value this culture over life on this planet, the life it is murdering. This valuing is almost universal in this culture. Even most mainstream environmentalists say explicitly that they’re attempting to save civilization, not the real world. For example, even someone as dedicated as Bill McKibben regularly states he wants to stop global warming to save civilization, and even someone equally dedicated like Peter Montague— who puts out the invaluable Rachel newsletter on toxics—said that pumping carbon underground for storage is a bad idea because if it leaked out all at once it could, to use his words, “disrupt civilization as we know it.” No, Peter, it could end life on earth. Here’s another example of this valuing: what do most mainstream “solutions” to global warming have in common? They all take industrial civilization as a given, and the natural world as that which (never who) must conform to industrial civilization. That is literally insane, in terms of being out of touch with physical reality. And it will never work.

This valuing of this culture over life is even inherent in the way Terrain.org’s request for this essay was phrased: “By apocalypse, of course, I mean simply the end of life as we know it—be it the result of nuclear war, the long-term result of climate change, a post-oil world, etc.”

This definition of apocalypse makes me incredibly sad. Especially the words “of course.” When I talk about the apocalypse I don’t mean “simply the end of life as we know it,” by which was clearly meant the end of this culture (because the causes included a “post-oil world” (by which was meant a post-oil culture)). What I mean when I talk about the apocalypse is the death of the planet. I mean the death of the salmon. I mean the death of the oceans. I mean the extirpation of 200 species per day. I mean 99 percent of native forests already having been murdered, and 99 percent of native grasslands, and so on. I mean one-quarter of all rivers no longer reaching the ocean. I mean oysters experiencing reproductive failure—which is science-speak for their babies all dying—in the ocean off the Pacific Northwest. I mean dead zones all through the oceans. I mean the collapse of migratory songbird populations. I mean the collapse of insect populations. I mean the collapse of bat populations. I mean the death of the real world.

Photo by Chris Jordan

Even when “life as we know it” is what’s killing the planet, far too many people, including far too many mainstream environmentalists, perceive the end of this culture as the real apocalypse. The real world doesn’t even enter the picture. So it’s no wonder the real world continues to be killed: it’s not nearly so important to most of the beneficiaries of this way of life as those benefits they gain from planetary murder.

How do we avoid seeing what is right in front of our eyes? Well, that’s dead easy: we simply spend more of our energy attempting to avoid facing the severity of the problems this culture is causing, than actually solving these problems.

One of the ways we avoid looking at the problems is by pretending those we are killing don’t really exist. For example, when I say this culture is killing the planet, I don’t mean it is causing, as too many people put it, the “irreparable breakdown of the Earth’s systems.” This is because I don’t believe the earth has systems. That is machine language. I believe the earth has communities. The world consists of subjects whose lives are as beautiful and precious to them as your own life is to you and mine is to me. And these subjects live in communities as complex and vibrant as those communities with which you and I are surrounded. This understanding is crucial, because the language we use not only reflects but influences how we perceive and experience the world—and how we perceive and experience the world influences how we behave in the world. And our current behavior is abysmal, and is killing the planet.

Another way we avoid looking at the severity of the problems is by pretending that the murder of the planet isn’t really the murder of the planet, but just “the death of the planet as we know it.” That language only serves to abstract us from the horrors. Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone. There is more plastic in the oceans than phytoplankton. Reflect on this: the oceans are being killed. The oceans.

Look at it this way: if a person you really love is dying from being poisoned (like rivers and oceans and soil), or from being skinned alive (prairies), or if someone you love is being tortured to death—and picture your parent, your child, your lover, your sibling, your best friend—would you say this person is dying “as we know it”? Of course not. Yet when it comes to the real world—the world that is the source of all life—this is precisely the attitude taken by even too many environmentalists.

Photo by Chris Jordan

Picture this: You’re sitting somewhere with a friend and suddenly you hear screaming and realize your lover is being tortured in the next room. You leap up, say to your friend, “My lover is being tortured and killed. We need to stop this!” Your friend sits on his chair, puffing contemplatively on his pipe, and responds, “Does this mean the death of your lover, or just the death of your lover as we know your lover?” So you sit right back down and say, “Damn good point, Charlie. I can always count on you to help me stay rational.” A philosophical conversation ensues, one that is so interesting that after a while you no longer hear the screams.

Sometimes at talks people say to me, “Oh, the world isn’t being killed. It’s just being transformed.” That’s merely another bullshit lie people tell themselves to maintain their distance, merely another way people can justify their lack of sufficient action in the face of planetary murder. Whenever people say this I always ask if they have a knife I can borrow. Someone in the audience gives me a knife. I walk up to the questioner and ask him (it’s almost always a male) to extend his hand. He doesn’t want to. I insist. I take his hand in mine. I hold the knife over the base of his finger. I don’t cut him, or even make the remotest gesture to, but I say, “Let’s pretend I’m going to start cutting you. I’m not going to kill you. I’m just going to transform you. I’m going to cut off this finger, and then this finger, and then this thumb, and then I’ll start on your toes, and then I’ll move to your hands, feet, arms, and your legs. But don’t worry, I won’t kill you. At some point your heart will stop beating, but that’s not a big deal: it’s not like I’m going to torture you to death or anything: it will merely be the end of your life as we know it, a transformation.”

Most people get the point.

Photo by Chris Jordan

If things are so bad, people sometimes ask, what drives your work? That’s really simple. What keeps me working is love. I love the salmon, and the lampreys, and the forest where I live, and I love the oceans, and I love the bears and slender salamanders and banana slugs. If you’re in love, you act to defend your beloved. If your beloved is threatened and you don’t do whatever it takes to defend your beloved, then what you’re feeling isn’t love.

Or sometimes I’m asked what gives me hope. The answer is that I don’t believe in hope. Hope is a longing for a future condition over which we have no agency. That’s how we use the word in everyday life: I don’t hope I eat something in a few moments—I’m just going to do it. On the other hand, the next time I get on a plane I hope it doesn’t crash: once it’s in the air I have no agency. So when people say they hope coho salmon survive, they’re saying they have no agency. I’m not interested in hope: I’m interested in doing what needs to be done. What salmon need to survive is five things: they need for dams to be removed, for industrial logging to stop, for industrial fishing to stop, for global warming to stop (which means for the oil economy to stop), and for the oceans to not be murdered. These are daunting but doable tasks. If those things happen salmon will survive. If they don’t, they won’t.

Someone once asked me, “Do you mean I can’t hope that my brother, who has cancer, survives?” I said, “Of course you can hope your brother survives: some of that is out of your control. But if he needs to go to the hospital, you can’t stand there with car keys in your hand and say, ‘I hope you make it to the hospital.’” You just do it.

The world is being murdered. Industrial civilization is causing this murder. This is not cognitively challenging. We need to stop this culture from killing the planet. The planet is more important than this culture. It’s more important than any culture. This is by definition, because without a planet you don’t have any culture at all. We need to fight for what we love, fight harder than we have ever thought we could fight.

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By Daniel McCool

Columbia University Press, 2012

Reviewed by Hal Crimmel

River Republic: The Fall and Rise of America’s Rivers by Daniel McCool
408 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0231161305

Since 1986, when Marc Reisner published Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, no book about American rivers has come close in stature to Reisner’s now classic account. Enter Daniel McCool’s latest book, River Republic: The Fall and Rise of America’s Rivers, which may well be the most important book published on rivers in the last 25 years. McCool, a professor of political science, delivers a tightly researched, witty, and inspirational story of everyday citizens who have worked against all odds to restore local rivers for the enjoyment of all—not just for industry and agribusiness. Particularly noteworthy is McCool’s idea of instigators, people who are “typically average Americans” with a “passion for a river” and an ability to “get society to think in new ways” about the status quo: polluted streams, ineffective flood-control projects, or wasteful agricultural practices, to name but a few. As McCool notes, “Instigators from throughout history inspire us” and provide “confidence that an individual can make a significant contribution to humankind.

As readers learn about the work of these instigators, they too may be inspired to take action on behalf of rivers, but also, perhaps, more broadly, for the environment in general. McCool illustrates that citizen action leavened with a balanced approach to working with multiple stakeholder groups can result in a successful new water ethic: one that benefits people, the economy, and the environment. This ethic is exemplified in the idea of a “River Republic,” characterized by sustainable public use of waterways, from fast-flowing high country streams to the languid meanders of bayou country. By breaking the stranglehold of special interests—government agencies, water districts, deep-pocketed businesses—Americans can democratize their rivers and in so doing restore ecological health to them.

The book is divided into three sections, and the tension felt between advocates for river restoration versus those supporting the status quo provides the foundation for Part I, entitled “The Fall.” Beginning with first-hand accounts of the debates about river restoration across the country, readers learn how two major agencies responsible for many of the nation’s river problems—The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation—are defined by cultures that contribute to as many problems as they solve. They may well be “Oldsmobile agencies in a Prius age,” as McCool suggests. In Part II, “Dismemberment,” the focus shifts to the way agriculture, hydropower, barging, flood control, and pollution have “diminished the value of rivers as a whole and instead allocated them to narrow, extractive uses”. Part III, “Resurrection,” celebrates the potential rivers have to provide habitat for wildlife, recreation, and renewal for the human spirit while still contributing to the economy. Far from being a condemnation of society and its excesses, the book instead advocates not for a “wholesale rejection of the past, but a frank, objective analysis of what best serves society in the long run”, and that, as McCool notes, means becoming “partners with our rivers, not exploiters of them.”

By unpacking much of the rhetoric and questionable economic data that historically has been used to justify misuse of rivers, River Republic illustrates how reasonable it is to think of our rivers in new ways. From exposing flood control boondoggles on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, to pointing out artificially cheap water rates in the western states, to revealing lax water pollution laws, it’s clear that Americans (and their politicians) have spoiled rivers for short-term gains. At the same time, hopeful stories of dam removals on the Ventura River in Southern California or those on Maine’s Penobscot River, along with urban river restoration projects in Seattle, Cleveland, Richmond, Washington, D.C., or Boston illustrate the success of citizen-led river restoration initiatives. With its mix of first-person narration, interviews, economic data, long-term sustainability goals, government data, and innovative economic and political analysis, River Republic is no policy-wonk treatise; the book reflects the author’s own ironic sense of the preposterousness of much of the nation’s water policy. “Under the current system,” writes McCool, “the American people are paying via taxation for the destruction of their own rivers”. On the other side of the coin, it’s clear that Americans are also taking the initiative to reverse the damage, with over 37,000 river restoration projects to date in the United State, so many in fact, that the process has become “something of a cottage industry.”

Learning about our shameful treatment of rivers may leave the reader upset and perplexed. More likely, readers will leave feeling hopeful about the wave of river-related environmental consciousness sweeping America, and perhaps with a new faith in the human capacity to effect meaningful change and undo previous mistakes. Quoting Mahatma Gandhi, McCool explains the process of change: “’First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.’” Ultimately, the book suggests, each of us may be inspired to act on behalf of rivers for future generations.

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By Nicole Walker

Microbivalves

I knew an oyster farmer who lived on the Puget Sound. He had so many oyster beds that he could barely see the ocean floor at all. Who needs the ocean floor when you have stacks of opaline shells tucking the whole fecund ocean between their halves? The oyster farmer offered me an oyster. No lemon. No mignonette. No Tabasco. The whole point of being an oyster farmer is that you don’t need anything else. You can survive on the protein of oysters. The world could fall away and you would still have a house, a beach, a vocation, a dinner, and a moneymaker. Not everyone can grow oysters. Most people can’t even open them. He is a gifted farmer. He knows how to seed the oysters directly in the sway of currents to bring the sweetest water, the most succulent plankton and algae passersby. Oysters are the great filters of the ocean. The farmer does what he can to make sure the algae and the plankton swing by the beds abundantly or the oysters might turn to eating plastic and heavy metals and all the coffee Seattle drains into the Sound.

Palmed in the oyster farmer’s hand, the oyster cinches shut. But he is a gifted farmer and a gifted metaphor-maker. He turns rock into sustenance. One knife jab and the hard shell turned to pulsing organ. Sexy oyster. All the genitals in one. Lick me, it seemed to say, so I did. The oyster tasted as shiny as the sun, which is why they grow in the sea near Seattle—Seattlers like to keep the sun underground. Save it for a rainy day.

But this oyster was one of the last oysters, rain or shine. The farmer could not make a filter for the filters. The tides were turning red. The oyster industry was in collapse. As carbon dioxide warmed the skies, it also changed the chemical make-up of the ocean. The ocean went from Tang to Lime-Aid and there was not a mollusk in the world who preferred sour over sweet. Not a Kumamoto or a Sweetwater. Not a Hood Canal or a Fanny Bay. The names themselves suggested doughnut and apple pie, ice cream and caramel. You once put lemons on an oyster as a counterpoint. Now all you have is point point point, make a point. Blue point oysters. A redundancy. As redundant as the farmer who walks along the beach, stares out across the water and sees the bottom of the vinegary, sexless ocean just fine.

Microbiotics

Most of the time I’m kidding. The apocalypse. I’m not afraid. There’s water in the pond on Butler Avenue. It is raining puffs of dust and wind. I have not seen an article about the bird flu all day. I have not even seen a bird. The Keystone Pipeline keeps a comin’, oil from sand—how can I worry we will ever run out of oil? I stock tomatoes—three Mason jars left. I have two packages of pork belly in the freezer. In most reserve? A pound of bonito flakes. May the ensuing apocalypse require miso soup! My munitions are no ammunition against any apocalyptic threat so I must not really be so worried.

And yet, on the top shelf, I keep an unused package of antibiotics. Azithromycin. A Z-pack my doctor gave me for a sinus infection I decided to make my immune system fight on its own to help stave off the antibiotic-resistant sinus infections of the future. The Z-pack is from 2011. It has probably expired. I wonder, at night, when I’m trying to fall asleep but not sleeping because of the bird flu, whether I should put the Z-pack in the freezer. I wonder if freezing the antibiotic would make it ineffective. I wonder why the doctors don’t keep all the antibiotics in the freezer in case our apocalypse comes supplied with electricity. I wonder about apocalypses without electricity. I think about the cold whirl of wind, the dry pond, the car in the garage that is fully out of gas. I picture making the last batch of dashi broth to feed my son and my daughter. I picture spooning it in their mouths. Their heads are draped with washcloths to keep the fever down. They are bone-thin. They are wretched because the apocalypse courts Dickens. I think of my Z-pack. Will half an antibiotic work for each child? Is whatever bird flu they have contracted antibiotic resistant? Isn’t the bird flu a virus anyway? Still, an infection. I do what I can. I break each of the pills in half. I think it’s only six days, it’s only six days, only six days, and then everything will be better. The water will fill. The birds will return. The flu will subside. The car will learn to run on sand. We will make our way to the ocean where the bonito sharks will leap into our arms, sacrificing themselves for our miso soup.

When I have these thoughts, I put my earplugs in, as if sealing off my ears can keep the thoughts out. But every once in a while, when even the earplugs don’t work, I find myself creeping downstairs to the closet where I keep the azithromycin, next to a Ziploc of lost buttons and two hundred vials of albuterol solution that we could not nebulize into my daughters lungs in an apocalypse that does not come supplied with electricity. I pray the apocalypse comes with electricity, but I presume that is not the name for apocalypse at all. There are visions of the future that are too hard to see. I bring the box of antibiotic into my hand. I look at the expiration date. I think, that is not too long. Not yet.

Microapocalpyse

I only have one friend, Steve, who thinks we will survive the apocalypse. I stockpile jarred tomatoes. He stockpiles guns. We will need each other and will have to find a way to traverse the 500 miles that separate us. We will also need: sourdough starter made from wretched old grapes, fermenting in yet another Mason jar; one of those new-fangled straws that filters water even when you stick it into a nearly toxic cesspool; one cow or goat for milk; two chickens for eggs; a solar-powered automobile that can hold at least a family of four, a goat, and two chickens; sun; limes; avocado; salt. We will not need to reinvent the wheel or electricity. We may need to reinvent the Internet and flush toilets.

We will need scissors, papers, pens, paperclips, staples—general office supplies—because if there is one thing we will surely miss, and want to rebuild, it is the tax-code. Benjamin Franklin said it was the library—or possibly fire stations—that made a civilization, but if there is one thing that unites us all, it is our love of April 15^th. Shared goals. A catholic expectation.

We will need seeds from not Monsanto and heart medication not from Merck. We will need the old growth forest back. We will need the polar bear back. We will need that one frog who keeps changing his sex back and forth depending on how much Prozac is in the water to finally pick a team and stick with it. We will need an ocean full of fish and oysters who forgot the name red tide. We will need someone to make movies and someone to critique them. We may need books but possibly only ones that have nice things to say about fish. We will need to partner with the otters to learn how to stay warm in the winter and to discuss with the prairie dogs how to make a proper communal town where all the berries are good for all the dogs, prairie or not. We will need not only jarred tomatoes but lemon curd. We will need apple pie. We will need to learn to make béchamel with milk from our friend, the goat. We will need someone who knows how to make guitars and someone who knows how to play one. We will need a blanket, a square sewn by everyone who ever thought, man, this might be the end, and then woke up the next day, happy that it wasn’t.

In the end, we will need a lot of things, but I think it’s going to be OK because these days Mason jars are plentiful and everyone I know is named Steve.

Three jars of homemade preserved hot mixed vegetables image courtesy Shutterstock.
Oysters in ice on the counter image courtesy Shutterstock.
Three jars of canned tomatoes lined in a row image courtesy Shutterstock.
Empty glass jar image courtesy Shutterstock.

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Mark Spitzer’s epic fishing tale, “Bromancing the Gar,” appears in Issue 32 of Terrain.org. Here, Spitzer recounts a few of the books that have inspired his writing.

By Mark Spitzer

Sick of Nature by David Gessner

This isn’t Gessner’s most important book (The Tarball Chronicles is), but it is his most significant for what it lends to the genre of environmental nonfiction. The flagship chapter is a resonating manifesto that calls “for wildness. For freedom. For sloppiness. For the exhilaration of breaking down the Berlin Wall of genre. [It’s] a plea for amateurism, variety, danger, spontaneity, and honesty in a world growing increasingly professional, specialized, safe, pre-packaged, partitioned, and phony.”

Like all good manifestos (see André Breton, 1924), Sick of Nature demonstrates the aesthetics Gessner proposes. The ensuing chapters range in subject matter from drunken Ultimate Frisbee antics to ranting at a horizon-defiling neighbor to tracking coyotes through urban Boston, all the while employing a unique, beer-swigging, highly-human-scholar voice as an example of innovating upon an all-too-polite and homogenous culture of mainstream, expected language. This is the kind of voice publishers of literary eco-nonfiction would be wise to incorporate on a vaster scale if they want to engage the next generation of readers and writers in this niche.

With by Donald Harington

All of Harington’s novels are overlooked masterpieces, but this is the most beautiful. An epic, 500-page fatty, this highly descriptive story of a kidnapped girl growing up in Ozark isolation is one of the most captivating and unusual reads I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Told from the POV of a dog, a ghost, and various creatures in the wild, I still find it hard to believe I was willing to suspend such disbelief, though I’m glad I did, because the ride was damn well worth the natural and unnatural places it took me to. Harington is a phenomenal narrator who always blazes new and novel ways to transport via the imagination. Pure genius! Vivid, moving & provocative!

America, a History in Verse – The 20^th Century, Volumes 1-5 by Ed Sanders

I started this 2000-page series over a decade ago with the paperbacks published by Black Sparrow Press. This series is now completely compiled and available on DVD-ROM in PDF form. Written in the eclectic style of “investigative poetics,” Sanders has chronicled the American experience of said century as thoroughly and creatively as super-humanly possible. Operating under the tenet that it’s the poet’s obligation to sing in a socially responsible manner through all the spigots of his bias (to paraphrase the thesis of Sanders’ Investigative Poetry, City Lights, ’74), Sanders’ unapologetic, humor-driven interpretation of politics and polis is the most colorful and informative text that has ever made sense of this country’s strange and wild clash between “civilization,” wilderness, all our fractioned factions of Evolution, and where we’re heading from here on out. A mammoth and Olympian bardwork of visionary awesomeness!

The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford

Ain’t no poem in the English language more epic, more ambitious, more visual and attuned to the flaming senses than this unkempt and sprawling Ejaculation from the Abyss. As Stanford’s magical, tragical literary legacy, this Whitmanesque tangle of garfish and levées and carnival midgets finds it nutmeat in the first howling 100 pages wherein an old black man fist-fights a bull rivercat while a mad dog chomps away on his leg and the river threatens to pull him under, all told from the perspective of a Southern Huck Finn side-stepping copperheads and reeling in the daze of fresh young skin. Then come eruptions of race, murder, etcetera. Holy Crap, what visions lurk herein!

Smokey and the Fouke Monster, Too Close to the Mirror, and The Man Behind the Legend by Smokey Crabtree

Smokey is a complex character, as well as the living legend behind an obscure self-published trilogy about a barefoot country kid who grew up in the swamps of Texarkana, trapping, fishing, and wrasslin’ wild hogs. Never mind the hunt for bigfoots, which is central to these memoirs; what I find interesting here is the sincere pioneer spirit chopping its way through the wilderness while battling bobcats along the way, plus alligator snapping turtles, mountain lions, crazed water moccasins, et alia. Sure, Smokey’s an environmental-activist-hating, live-by-the-rod, paranoid conservative who I’d have nothing to do with if he lived next door, but his riveting, action-packed adventures are incredible (and credible) testimonies to the way life used to be when self-professed rednecks had nothing more than a rifle, a pair of overalls, and sheer grit.

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The editors of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments are pleased to announce our Spring 2013 issue, No. 32, with the theme of “Craft”. Check out these fantastic takes on the theme:

On craft and context: the Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Photo by John Faier.

Columns

• Guest Editorial ~ Craft and Context: Connecting Architecture to Place and Time
  Mark Sofield, Architect
• Almanac ~ Provenance
  Elizabeth Dodd, Terrain.org Editorial Board Member ~ with audio
• A Stone’s Throw ~ Walking Thoughts on a Frozen Pond
  Lauret Savoy, Terrain.org Editorial Board Member

To Know a Place

• Stone That Leaps: A Utah Sequence
  Poetry by Christopher Cokinos, Photography by Stephen Trimble ~ with audio and image gallery

Interview

• Andrés Duany, Architect and Town Planner
  Interviewed by Galina Tachieva

ARTerrain Gallery

• Kate Protage : Urban Slice

Poetry

• David Wagoner : Three Poems
• Maureen Kingston : Two Poems with Audio
• Susana H. Case : One Poem with Audio
• Al Maginnes : Two Poems
• Jenny Morse : One Poem with Audio
• Julie Lein : Three Poems with Audio
• Lauren Eggert-Crowe : Three Poems with Audio
• Jeevan Narney : “Odes to the Little Ones” ~ An Online Chapbook with Images and Audio

Nonfiction

• Order and Entropy: Earth, Rock, and Craft on the Grand Canyon Trail Crew
  Nathaniel Brodie ~ with audio and image gallery
• Hook and Sway
  Tamie Marie Fields ~ with images and audio
• Bromancing the Gar: In Pursuit of Trinity River Seven-Footers
  Mark Spitzer
• She Poured Out Her Own
  Julene Bair

Fiction

• Rectilinear
  David Rose ~ with audio
• Drifiting
  Steve Edwards ~ with audio
• Shuttle
  Katie Rogin

Reviews

• Through the Second Skin, poems by Derek Sheffield
  Reviewed by Alison Hawthorne Deming
• The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, edited by Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster
  Reviewed by Corey Lewis
• The Natural Building Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to Integrative Design and Construction, by Jacob Dev Racusin and Ace McArleton
  Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

Unsprawl Case Study

• BioMap2 Conservation Road Map
  Conserving the Biodiversity of Massachusetts in a Changing World
  Henry Woolsey, Andy Finton, James DeNormandie, and Sarah Haggerty

View the full issue now at http://terrain.org.

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By Marielle Smith and Ty Taylor

Ty: I leaned back in my harness, secured by a lanyard around the tree’s trunk and my legs woven through a tangle of branches and vines. Raindrops pelted my eyes as I surveyed the top of the tree, looking for waterlogged branches that could fall on me from above. Water poured over my snake-proof gators and dropped, traversing some fifty feet of air between my perch and the forest floor. From this crow’s nest, I wrestled my pole pruner—fully extended to thirty feet—into the crown of a neighboring tree. Yanking the cord, the pulley-driven pruner bit hard into the branch I was after, and my sample fell, tumbling and brushing vines on its way to the ground. I had collected all I needed. I prepped for rappel—so happy, loving the rain and the breeze that demanded such alertness at the top of a tree.

Marielle: I was driving back from the field after trying to fix yet another malfunctioning piece of equipment. Trees fall across that dirt road all the time, and as I rounded each corner I felt an increasing sense of hope that I might escape without facing any obstructions. It was New Year’s Eve, and I was already running late. Sure enough, I came around the last bend and found the trunk of a newly fallen tree barring my way. I wasn’t getting to the party anytime soon! I’d been nervous going into the forest on my own; I could chop through small trunks with my machete, but would need help carving up a tree this size. Luckily, I was only a quarter-mile from the guard station, which protects the entrance to the national forest. After some laborious repairs to the guards’ vintage chainsaw, we made quick work of clearing the road. Ty and I made it to the local beach town in time for champagne.

These memories come from a five-month field research campaign in the eastern Brazilian Amazon in 2012. The Amazon—a paragon of tropical wilderness—has long held great allure for both of us. And how did we come to find ourselves together in this beautiful, sweaty, chigger-infested forest? We met in a rainforest in Costa Rica in 2007. Ty had escaped the biting air of the Alaskan winter to work in the tropical forest canopy. He was studying a symbiotic interaction between plants and fungi among a unique set of plants—called epiphytes—that live on the branches of tropical trees. Marielle came from her home in England to work with then PhD-student Stephen Whitfield on the causes of amphibian and reptile population declines.

Inspired by free time spent together on late-night puma and frog hunting expeditions, we decided to follow each other around for a while. Marielle was introduced to vast boreal forests and dynamic mountain ranges during packrafting trips in Alaska, and Ty tasted the culture of civilization among 800-year-old buildings in Marielle’s hometown of Cambridge, England. In 2010, we were fortunate enough to be accepted into the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department at the University of Arizona, where we are both working towards PhDs with the same advisor, Dr. Scott Saleska, and where we are now part of Dr. Saleska’s Amazon PIRE (Partnership in International Research and Education) research group, a project funded by the National Science Foundation, consisting of an international network of researchers and students studying the future of Amazonian forests under climate change.

Every year, the Amazon forest processes (through photosynthesis and respiration) twice the amount of carbon dioxide than is emitted by anthropogenic fossil fuel emissions. Climate change is expected to hit the Amazon with higher temperatures and more severe droughts. Given the scale of the Amazon basin and its importance for global carbon and water cycling, the responses of this enormous forest to climatic changes are predicted to in turn alter the global climate. The aim of our research group is to better understand how the forest interacts with the climate now, so we might better predict how the forest will react to climate change in the coming decades.

Our 2012 campaign took place in the Tapajós National Forest near Santarém, Brazil, one of the driest parts of the Amazon, where a 65-meter tower lined with instrumentation provided us with a puzzle to resolve: the tower told us that the forest photosynthesizes more during the driest period of the year. Collaborating with two other students to figure out what drives this counter-intuitive behavior, Marielle tested the hypothesis that the forest photosynthesizes more because it increases its leaf area during the dry season. If this is the case, then the forest may be more limited by light than water, and is taking advantage of increased light during the dry season when there are fewer clouds. To test this hypothesis, Marielle employed a special instrument, called LiDAR (light detection and ranging), which shoots high frequency laser pulses up into the forest canopy to map leaf distributions.

Marielle: Measuring forest structure using the LiDAR required me to walk at a slow pace through the forest. Each measurement meant walking eight km of trails, which I did every two weeks, so I was able to really observe how the forest changed through the dry season; each time, I would encounter new flowers and smells. This was also the perfect way to see life in the forest, most commonly howler monkeys, agoutis (large rodents), snakes, and tortoises. Walking so many hours with my local field assistant also gave me time to practice my Portuguese. He taught me how the locals use the forest—for example, how they use a particular vine to tie poles between trunks in order to string their hammocks up high, out of reach of jaguars.

It is important to keep in mind that even if Marielle’s hypothesis is supported, and the forest is not stressed from water limitation during a normal dry season, this does not suggest that the forest will never be drought-stressed, it just means we need a better understanding of its limits. For example, a widespread drought in Amazonia in 2005 caused increased rates of tree death across the basin. The resulting excess of wood decomposition caused a net loss of carbon from the forest to the atmosphere, increasing the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere and demonstrating the type of feedback between forest and climate that our group is trying to better understand.

An important result from the 2005 droughts was that some species were able to withstand the excess water deficit, while others were not. During this 2012 campaign, Ty worked on a project that he hopes will help us understand the species-specific responses to climate changes. Ty assessed the composition of tree species and leaf and wood characteristics in areas of the forest with hot and dry microclimates, such as the edge of the national forest along the highway. He believes forest composition in these locations portends the characteristics and activity of the Amazon in a hotter and drier future.

Ty: Some trends, only the data will show you. But my ability to interpret the data and ask relevant questions is enhanced by knowledge of the forest absorbed through my own eyes. On an overnight trip in the forest, Marielle and I followed our machetes off-trail for a few miles and slept in hammocks under our tarp. As we descended from the clay-soil plateau to a sandy valley, the forest shrunk, the understory opened, and giant palm fronds barred the way. The species composition was clearly different on these nutrient and water-deprived soils, but there were some groups in common with the plateau. I mused: could it be that as the climate over the Amazon warms and dries during this century, these tough species of the sandy soils will expand their ranges to dominate the landscape and maintain the functions of the forest?

During our time in the Amazon, we hacked through our fair share of tree-falls, endured endless troubleshooting of instruments tormented by the high humidity, and wandered for countless hours through unnamed streets—over asphalt radiating the tropical heat—to find obscure shops for spare parts and field supplies. After five months, we were dead tired.

Back in Arizona, our lives are very different. Most of our time now is spent in front of computer screens, writing scripts in command-line programs to organize and analyze our data. After the day-to-day thrills and challenges of the field, the amount of deskwork ahead of us is daunting. Still, we’re happy to be preparing to contribute our own answers to important questions about how the Amazon is responding to climate change.

As we stare at the numbers on our screens, we remember not just the hardships, but our friends who taught us which vines you can cut for a drink of water, and cold beers with our feet dipped in the old igarapé (a stream) below the camp. We recall the pitter patter of falling flowers that, on closer inspection, look like the heads of alien creatures, and the landscape of odors that sometimes compel you to follow them, like an insect, to their source. As scientists, we will always need more data, and as humans, we will always need more adventure. The Amazon will continue to draw us back for both.

Hover over an image to see its details, or click image to view in larger format and begin slideshow:

Flowers from the Brazil-nut tree family Lecythidaceae resemble the heads of alien creatures.<br>Photo by Marielle Smith. | Ty spends Christmas Eve sorting and identifying over 300 dried plant specimens before sending them to the herbarium in Belém.<br>Photo by Marielle Smith. | Rounding the last bend in the road before leaving the park, I found a medium-sized tree blocking my way. It was New Year’s Eve, and I wasn’t getting to the party any time soon!<br>Photo by Marielle Smith. | "The 45-meter walk-up tower and the dynamic canopy at our research site in the Tapajós National Forest, Brazil. Photo shot from the 65-meter “flux” tower.<br>Photo by Ty Taylor. | Marielle with the LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) instrument. High frequency laser pulses are shot from two lenses, the return time is recorded, and this data is used to map the structure of the canopy.<br>Photo by Ty Taylor. | Ty combines traditional and technical climbing methods to collect branch samples from a study tree. The strap around his feet, called a “peconha” by the locals, is typically used to climb palms to collect fruits. While working in the tree crown, he secures himself with a harness and lanyard.<br>Photo by Ty Taylor. |

Post-script acknowledgements: We are indebted to our scientific collaborators and other dear friends from Santarém, Manaus, São Paulo, Campinas, Arizona, Harvard, and elsewhere for their logistical support, productive collaborations, and friendship. Without their support, none of this would have been possible.

For more writing, photos, and movies of our adventures and science visit us at www.tyeenandmaz.com.

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By Melissa Gutierrez

The human being is a walking label-maker. We with mouths and pens and keyboards love to define things, dominate them with our words and verbs, have a short quick sense of everything. We name our kids and pets, invent acronyms for all our ailments, and have a hundred ways of saying the color green. It’s all part of an ongoing individual and communal effort to find the meaning of life: if we can define enough things in life, then perhaps maybe we can give a name to life itself.

I recently tried to define reality (cue eye-roll, and read about it here) and came up with this list of contradictions: a simultaneous appreciation for the outdoors and the movies, for animals and fake fur, for the homeless and the Donald Trumps.

I tend to breeze over defining big things like this, like “reality”, because really digging into them is hard (again: way easier to name your dog), but defining them via paradox is surprisingly easy. A paradox is a simple way of saying that things aren’t simple, a simple way of encompassing complexity—which ultimately means that things are simple, which I like, and think is real. A sentence—a string of nouns, a set of images, a story or a poem—really is life. The list that follows is my attempt to explain the contradictions that, in some way, define my reality. This is my string of nouns and images and stories, the almost-opposites that mean life to me.

Concerning my appreciation for the outdoors… I like to tell the story of how my family once went on a two-week road trip to the Grand Canyon, and when we finally got there, we just didn’t care. It was hot. It was big. It was whatever. We weren’t going to do anything major like hike across it, camp at the bottom of it, ride donkeys all around the upper rim. What I remember most was that we were playing the license plate game (where you try to find the license plates of all 50 states throughout your trip), and in the hot, crowded, bumper-to-bumper Grand Canyon parking lot, we finally saw Rhode Island. So this is my outdoors life—average and unstellar, but existent nonetheless. We did, as kids, ride our bicycles around the court and go down the street into the empty field to look for lizards. Sometimes we walked along the bike path to the creek, with stalks of fennel looming and the smelly sounds of skunks and neighborhood cats fighting for our ears and hair. It was sort of scummy, but it was our style. It was there for us and we for it. That’s nature, right?

…and the movies: At the height of my fussy, conflicted, too-socially-aware upper-adolescence, I boycotted movie-going after learning about injustice in the world—child soldiers, AIDS, war, etcetera. I was convinced, somehow, that movies were the anti-everything, the big black corporate cloud about to overpower all things good and natural and real. “It costs $10 for every seat in a movie theater, and there’s what, 500 seats in every theater, and 20 theaters at every complex, times how many movies a day?” I would yell, lose track of fingers, sigh, and wait in the car or at a restaurant pouting while everybody else went to see The Hulk and have a nice, normal time together. Together. Remember that. When you can’t live with everything you live alone.

For animals… Like anyone not a sociopath or plagued with allergies I genuinely love animals, which is actually not a very simple thing to do. Some people say if you love animals then don’t kill them or eat them or wear their skin. Others say if you love animals then kill them and have them stuffed and hung up on the wall. These are mutually exclusive options. What’s a girl to do? Some go vegan, others redneck, complete with almond milk or .50 caliber rifles. But me? I buy my steaks at Safeway and catch up with Zooborns on my breaks at work. When you don’t know what to do you can only be yourself, which is different than being by yourself.

…and fake fur: Fake fur means a couple things to me, also contradictory. It can mean a sincere human effort to find a replacement to animal cruelty, or it can mean just another cool material consumer good to buy at the mall and wear all the time. Both of these, however, are actually the same thing: a way to have our cake and eat it too. Whatever we think about animals, we still want them both alive and around our neck. I hope you’re thinking of Cruella de Ville here—if the black and white hair split just down the middle doesn’t scream “identity crisis” or “incapable of decision and/or letting go and/or understanding opportunity cost”, then you need to go rewatch your Disney. Does loving animals—or anything—mean necessarily being so split, or so one-sided? I don’t know, but I don’t want to be Cruella.

For the homeless…. In fourth grade my class took a fieldtrip to a homeless shelter in the city, to help serve meals. My dad drove me and this boy I had a crush on, Cameron, and I was in charge of giving the homeless guys butter for their rolls, and it really wrecked me—their dirt, their gruff, the cracks in their skin. I couldn’t go to San Francisco for a really long time, would go see a play with my grandma and come home all in tears. I know now—as I now know that boycotting movies isn’t an efficient social change maneuver—that just wailing about things and/or avoiding them doesn’t do anything for anyone but me, but back then I just couldn’t take it. If I never went to San Francisco, then San Francisco wasn’t real, and homelessness wasn’t either.

…and the Donald Trumps: I’ll be honest, I don’t know much about Donald Trump, but what he means to me is power, TV, money, hair, and society’s attention. What I mean when I say Donald Trump is total world-defined success, which is the opposite of what I talk about when I talk about homeless people, who are completely unsuccessful by most social standards, a symbol of human failure. If we believe we all are human, however—and we should because we are—then we believe we all are successful, or at least capable of success. That gets tricky to say what with trying to judge or decide what human potential is on a general and/or individual level and whether or not any given person is living up to or in light of that and all, but what I think I mean is this: as far as just plain ol’ bein’ alive goes, a homeless guy is as successful as Donald Trump.

So this is my paradox: this big beautiful world to see—in redwood-studded parks, on every dirty corner, in every stuff-filled store, on every size of screen—and still all these problems with and in it. Younger me was uncomfortable with that, didn’t like it, couldn’t sit with it or in it. Me today, me writing this, knows that the answer is simply to put that contradiction in a sentence, to let it be my life. I put these things in a sentence and then they live together—they coexist in a syntactical habitat, if you will. And if they can coexist there then they can coexist in my imagination, and if they can coexist in my imagination then they can coexist in my world.

Because what’s really real about life is that whatever life is, it’s here with us, in all its opposites and extremes. And that’s a kind of love, I think—being everything you are and never leaving. Because what is love but my father at his father’s dying side, or my family cheering at my graduation—the people who refuse to leave you or ignore you at your best or worst? This earth, that won’t stop spinning, no matter what you try to do?

Blue dirty painted wall texture image courtesy Shutterstock.
Detailed texture with chipped paint on rusty metal image courtesy Shutterstock.
Texture of old white paint on rusty metal image courtesy Shutterstock.

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Over on LitBridge today there’s an interview with our tall drink of water and editor-in-chief Simmons Buntin. Here’s an excerpt; read the whole thing over at www.litbridge.com/2013/04/05/interview-with-terrain-org.

Terrain.org editor-in-chief Simmons Buntin at the recent Wild Lives / Raucous Pens reading with Ecotone and Hawk & Handsaw in Boston.

What sort of qualities do you look for in a manuscript or piece of work that you are considering for publication?

Surprise, delight, tone, voice—you know, excellence. What we seek is place-based work that sings (sometimes literally). That’s broad, I realize, but if you look at Terrain.org, you’ll find we like a variety of work in a variety of styles. In nearly every case, however, the work is eloquent, concise, and questioning. It has a sense of place, or a yearning to find that sense. What we don’t want is the stuff everyone has read before, or that feels like that—the nature walk, the suburbs are bad, the end of the world. Unless it knocks are socks off, which sometimes it does. And we don’t like typos.

Do you have a specific aesthetic preference? How would you describe that aesthetic? 

Because we publish such a broad range of work, including hybrid forms, photo essays, online slideshows, audio, and videos, it’s hard to identify a single aesthetic preference. In general, you’ll find more narrative work (whether poetry or prose) and fewer experimental contributions—though that doesn’t mean less lyrical. Our aesthetic is place, which when you think about it is a human construct.

Thanks to LitBridge for the opportunity, and for adding us to its list of Top Journals, too!

Now get ye over to the full interview.

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By Kirk Wisland

Puma concolor: a.k.a. cougar, panther, puma, Indian devil, catamount, mountain lion. The mountain lions are coming back, down from the mountainous West, through the foothills of the Great Plains, pushing east, re-colonizing lost lands. They come by night, following the riparian corridors of the great river of the West—the Missouri—and all her tributaries.

Following the Yellowstone, Tongue, Powder, and Little Missouri rivers into North Dakota, following the Grand, Belle Fourche, Cheyenne, James, and Big Sioux through South Dakota, following the Niobrara, Loup, and Platte through Nebraska, following the Republican, Smoky Hill, Arkansas, and Neosho through Kansas, following the Canadian, and the Red through Oklahoma and Texas.

Into the Midwest, the great wooded idylls of Missouri and Minnesota—overripe with deer. Ironically, it is the success of the predator eradication efforts of the 19^th century (see also Grizzly Bear and Wolf, systematic extirpation of) that is bringing the mountain lion back. As went the theory, without the predators the “game” population did in fact explode, and now it is this abundance of deer—fat, lazy deer—that beckons the cat down from the mountains with the promise of an easy dinner. These swollen herds of whitetails lure the mountain lion back east.

Through the flat lands of Iowa and Kansas, they creep from tree to tree, copse to copse. These cats are adapting to sparse cover. They are piecing together oases of undeveloped land into territories.

The dispersers are primarily males—all the young dudes setting out for new territory, epic odysseys in search of a home. A mountain lion radio-collared in 2003 travelled nearly 700 miles from his home in the Black Hills of South Dakota before being killed by a train in Oklahoma. He sauntered west into Wyoming and then turned south through Nebraska, skirting Omaha, parsing Kansas, finally arriving in the Oklahoma panhandle.

He came from one of the two remaining indigenous pockets of the great cats east of the Rockies—the mountain lion of the western Dakotas, and the beleaguered Florida panther, sulking sullenly in his swampy tip of the Everglades.

It is the hardy band of indigenous Black Hills mountain lions who have been so impressively dispersing themselves—east into Minnesota and Iowa, south through Nebraska, Kansas, into Oklahoma, claws stretching to meet up with their kin in the native populations of West Texas.

The great American lion covered every inch of this country in 1800—from Maine to the coastal ranges of southern California, from the Everglades to Puget Sound. But we banished them from the East as we chewed across the land like locusts. We exiled them to the furthest reaches—but fortunately for the mountain lions, they are at home in the craggy crevices of the Mountain West. They retreated into the Rockies like cat insurgents, re-grouping to fight another day.

I am dreaming of mountain lions because they are a success story—they are re-colonizing America without a re-introduction plan, without government protection. They are an unstoppable force. We still roadblock their progress with car, train, bullet, trap, and poison, but we can’t prevent their inevitable spread. Like spring snowmelt carving through winter’s remains, the mountain lion will find his way.

The urban density of the East—particularly the I-95 corridor—is the natural ally of our great open spaces. Unfortunately, while the new-urban developments of our greener angels speak to the need for preserving open spaces, they are primarily Astroturf Edens—open fields and mini-forests with nature cast out save for the songbirds and squirrels.

Why is there such antipathy towards our great predators? What kind of person carries such an irrational, medieval hatred for the Mountain Lion, the Wolf, the Grizzly Bear? Because this animus is not just about money. In the West the members of this great Predator Triumvirate populate our public lands. If you want the privilege of grazing your cattle or sheep on these lands, occasional predation is not an unreasonable tax. But in the parlance of the stockmen, our predators are not rightful heirs to the land they lived on when we were but a dream in the eyes of the Conquistadors—but rather are a pestilence, a scourge they deem as an alien threat to their ponderous munching herds of non-native cattle and sheep.

My uncle has a stuffed mountain lion in his living room. This is how it ended up there: a pack of dogs chased this cat for three hours until it finally climbed a tree in exhaustion. The hunting party—leisurely tracking the radio-collared dogs—arrived in their pickup truck and my uncle shot it out of the tree with a .45 in one hand and a beer in the other.

For what? For vanity.

I have no issue with the humane harvesting of animals for food. But it is time to kill the Hemingway myth, time to put an end to the wanton destruction of our predators for the satiation of our basest ego.

Could we restore our American Serengeti? Let us halt our suburban expansion. Let us draw a moat of open land around our cities, a barrier to all further development.

As the Great Plains depopulates, as small towns disappear and the people of the prairie migrate to Helena, Denver, Omaha—might we visualize the great buffalo herds running once again from the Texas panhandle to the Canadian interior? Starting just north of Amarillo there would only be four interstate highways to cross—one each in Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas. The potential disruption of a couple hundred buffalo charging across the concrete would be minimal, as these open stretches of highway are barely more peopled now than they were as wagon-rut trails 150 years ago.

I know I am not the only one whose heart swells with the post-apocalyptic scenes of 12 Monkeys or I am Legend: the image of lions hunting zebras in Manhattan. Or perhaps more reasonably—and less apocalyptically for we humans—the thought of the mountain lion once again roaming the country from coast to coast, corner to corner.

But first we have to get these cats safely across the Mississippi River. Very few have been sighted east of the great water highway. For every live sighting—every hint of the mountain lion’s presence in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky or Tennessee—there are multiple carcasses found, frequently on railroad bridges crossing the watery expanse.

Not that Puma concolor won’t swim. They are not water lovers like tigers, but they will jump in when no other opportunity presents itself. Florida Panther 62—a radio-collared refugee from the cramped confines of the Everglades—swam 160 feet across the Caloosahatchee River on his way north to new territory in central Florida. But the mighty Mississippi—even at her most tranquil stretches through Louisiana—is still a river too wide.

Adventurous, border-hopping Canadian lions are already working their way south through Maine and Michigan—but not fast enough. We could wait patiently for the great eastern migration to swell—

—or we could help it along ourselves.

Just as I yearned during my first year of college to spike trees rather than study my forest management coursework, I imagine getting more radically proactive. Maybe just kidnap a couple mountain lions and drive them across the river. We definitely need breeding females, who by their nature don’t wander as far from their home territories. All the wandering dudes of the West won’t lead to a viable population without females to breed with. For now the lonely male dispersers aimlessly stalk their new territories like teenage boys—charged up and ready to mate, but too fearful of territorial fathers to head back home.

So, couldn’t we cart a mature mating pair from Colorado or West Texas, drive across the Mississippi at Memphis, drive up into the Appalachians, maybe into the Smoky Mountains? The mountain lions will probably make it back there on their own. But just this once, couldn’t we be the collaborator instead of the impediment?

Florida panther postage stamp image courtesy Shutterstock.
Mountain lion 22 cent postage stamp image courtesy Shutterstock.
Mountain lion 18 cent postage stamp image courtesy Shutterstock.

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By Sara Loewen

University of Alaska Press, 2013

Reviewed by Simmons B. Buntin

Every now and then a magazine is lucky enough to include a contribution that irrevocably changes the publication—and for the better. New writer Sara Loewen’s essay “To Know a Place,” which published as “Setnet Fishing on Uyak Bay” in Terrain.org in 2010 and appears in her first book, Gaining Daylight: Life on Two Islands, is just such a piece. When nonfiction editor Joshua Foster forwarded the essay to me, his endorsement was straightforward: “Dude, this is fantastic.” But there was more at work here then a delicious essay about fishing and the harsh but providing landscape of Uyak Bay, Alaska, particularly for our journal. This essay launched a new section altogether, To Know a Place, which features an essay, story, or set of poems from one contribution that portrays an intimate relationship to a single place.

The essay became our new section’s inaugural contribution. Loewen also provided several of her excellent photographs and an audio reading. I’ve thought of the essay and those photos often since we published it, for her storytelling and imagery (and images) are so delightful that they deserve a wider audience and further consideration.

Luckily, we have that opportunity and much more with the publication of her book, a collection of 20 short essays ranging from lyrical to historical, all about the two islands, Kodiak and Amook, she migrates between with her fisherman husband and two young boys over the course of a year. “To Know a Place” is set on Amook Island, among the family’s isolated fishing-season cabin and storm-tossed landscape. Other essays take place there and on Kodiak, where the family overwinters, though the essays also range to the Pacific Rim, notably Thailand, Hawaii, Japan, and historic Russia.

Gaining Daylight begins with a preface that sets the book’s overall tone. “I was born and raised in remote Alaska,” she writes, “yet I am still adjusting to the isolation of a life surrounded by water, to days of slow rain that muffle sound and steal color.” There are plenty of loving and lovely moments here, but deep at its center is Loewen’s struggle to raise boys in a panoramic but treacherous landscape, particularly when her husband is out on the bay (or farther) fishing for salmon, not that she doesn’t play more than an onlooker’s role there. Her life and this place are all hands on board. In short, Loewen’s is a dangerous, intimate, remote, and altogether compelling life.

Early in the book, it becomes clear that the author’s challenge in portraying this life is two-fold: firstly, going deep enough to give the reader a real sense of the region’s landscape and culture, as well as her personal risks, rewards, and residuals; and secondly, writing broadly enough to take the essays beyond that of merely regional interest and into the realm of universal experience. The form of the essays matters here, too, because the chapters of Gaining Daylight are diverse in their approach, though not in their length: none is longer than ten pages.

The opening essay, “Giant Wings,” plus “To Know a Place” and “Unsinkable”—two of my favorites—are narrative personal essays. The book also includes a few historical accounts: “Hunger and Thirst,” about Kodiak’s Russian American settling, for example, or “A Lake by Any Other Name,” about the glamorous, World War II-era namesake for Kodiak’s Lake Rose Teed. These are interesting but not quite told in the same voice. Somewhere between, though I think hoping toward the lyrical, is the lovely, fascinating “Winter in June,” which braids the June 6, 1912 eruption of Novarupta—which cloaked the region in darkness for days—with Loewen’s own struggle with the darkness of winter. “In winter,” she writes, “I grieve for lost light.” It’s a delicate, articulate interweaving of the two.

Into the more lyrical she ventures with “Fifteen Times over the Bridge” and “Capacious,” the latter particularly delightful, almost a prose poem. But at this point in the book—and I don’t mean that literally, for I’m skipping around here—the style ranges so much that Gaining Daylight begins to lose its center. Of particular note here are the essays “December,” “Woman Overboard,” and “Elementary Love.” Part of the University of Alaska Press’s Alaska Literary Series, this is a small collection—just 150 pages in all including a dozen pages of notes and credits—so I understand the desire to put in as much well-written work as is available and, at least on the surface, is relevant. But in my reading, the collection would be stronger without these essays, which, except “Elementary Love,” feel like graduate school creative writing exercises (and Loewen acknowledges most of these essays came out of her grad school experience; there’s certainly nothing wrong with that… unless they haven’t moved beyond that workshop mode). “Elementary Love,” on the other hand, comes with an unexpected kind of spite, even a pettiness that doesn’t exist elsewhere. Nor should it. The essay is a letter to a grade school teacher for whom Loewen substitutes, and I cannot see its purpose here among what otherwise is a beautiful exploration of self and place.

Despite the above criticism, however, Gaining Daylight is a finely crafted collection rich with lyrical language and insight. Take, for example, these metaphors and images: “where crows are rising off the bluff like bits of ash from a campfire” ~ “we walked for miles along the water, where the only remaining things were empty blue-tiled swimming pools, like fallen squares of sky” ~ “the fog tonight feels like kindness” ~ “shadows are a kind of novelty here” ~ “the cannery comes into view like an old retouched photograph.” Gaining Daylight is full of this beautiful imagery, the surprising comparisons that only come with a deep knowledge of place and accomplished grasp of language.

Knowledge and language alone, of course, are not enough for a book to sing. Fortunately, there’s much more at work here, and while I’d hope that several of the essays would be deeper and therefore longer—there’s more to be explored in “Sea Chains Broken” and “Red Caviar,” for instance; and I feel that we don’t yet truly know her family (though I understand a mother’s need to guard there)—my sense is that this is just an introduction, almost a teasing really, of what we can expect from this young Alaskan writer moving forward. It’s a wonder, on one hand, that she found the time to craft such remarkable little pieces—let alone collect them in a book—but like the best writing it leaves the reader yearning for more. It seems there is a promise in here of that—family life, landscape, and climate all willing.

Gaining Daylight: Life on Two Islands is full of those promises, and rich with promise. It is a wonderful debut that deftly spans Loewen’s own inner and Alaskan geographies with a rare intimacy, elegance, and steadfastness. Like the tides on Uyak Bay, the essays move with a certain rightness and loveliness, a definite rhythm—and so we are moved by them.

Header photograph by Sara Loewen.

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Photographer Erik Hoffner is a regular contributor to Terrain.org, most recently reporting on the Swedish forestry industry. His essay “Ghost Nests” and accompanying photographs appeared in issue 27, and here, Hoffner recommends a few photographers and resources that have inspired his work.

By Erik Hoffner

Minamata: The Story of the Poisoning of a City… by W. Eugene and Aileen M. Smith

As a teenager I picked up a copy of W. Eugene Smith’s Minimata, a long project from the early 1970s that documented the mass poisoning of a Japanese coastal town by a corrupt corporation—really a startling analog to the 2011 incident in Fukushima involving the Tokyo Electric Power Company. In this case, the Chisso Corporation regularly dumped methyl mercury into the sea, which quickly concentrated up the food chain and resulted in horrific suffering among the local fishing community—and led to the discovery of a new human health syndrome, dubbed Minimata disease, after the area at the center of the problem. Smith’s jarringly beautiful black and white portraits of the effects on this fishing community, including intimate portraits of the sometimes horrific physical deformities people suffered, made a big impression on me. As Minimata demonstrates, the most important image-making is rarely about making a pretty picture, but rather exposing truth and telling people’s stories.

The work of Sebastião Salgado

In that vein, another major influence on me (and so many others) is the work of Sebastião Salgado, a master of composition, and black and white technique. His portrayals of exploitative labor in the developing world—showing the migrations of landless people and the fate of children caught in the middle of huge issues like these—are at once shocking, gorgeous, and educational. One art critic calls his work “fine art photojournalism,” which, whether it’s an actual genre or not, directly influenced my own recent projects in Poland and Sweden. Few have done so much for our fellow humans by standing behind a lens. But Salgado frequently gets out from behind the camera to work for direct change in the world, too: for example, his Instituto Terra project in Brazil, which is reforesting a swath of degraded coastal rainforest. While Salgado’s work often shows the interrelatedness of justice, human suffering, and ecology in stark detail, his most recent project, Genesis, illustrates the potential for humanity to rediscover itself in the world’s remaining unspoiled ecology.

SocialDocumentary.net

One more source of regular inspiration in the photojournalistic tradition I enjoy is SocialDocumentary.net, a web gallery for ambitious projects spanning the globe, and exploring all issues and mediums with frankness and power. The members of this site share intimate profiles and storylines rarely heard within the American news bubble, from Iran to Myanmar and Appalachia to Armenia. Touring its lush pages is a constant source of inspiration and education, and I admire the dedication of this new corps of photo-documentary explorers and truth tellers.

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