The view from Praia de Meireles.

May 15. 2012

A day and night given to travel in which it’s impossible to know what’s going on down there below the cotton ball layer of sky until at last we cut through on descent to the spectacle of green felted mountains that lie just inland of the Atlantic coast. They seemed as sharp and young as Tucson’s perimeter mountains, but the ferocity of electric green is a jolt for someone like me coming from an arid land. Fortaleza is perched on the easternmost protuberance of Brazil.  It would fit into the concavity on the west African coast, if Pangaea ever drifted back together.

I’m here for two weeks with Chris Merrill, who directs the Iowa International Writing Program that has brought us here, Joe Tiefenthaler and Alan Heathcock. Cornelius Eady and Maria Jose Barbosa will join us in a few days. The Battery Dance Company from New York City is touring in Brazil as well, working with kids to choreograph performances, and working with us to collaborate on performances of our work tomorrow night at the Dragão do Mar Cultural Center.

First day impressions: elegant seaside highrises butting right up to the sand beach; wind turbines, oil tankers, the Beach of the Future right around the bend. Bird of paradise flowers in the hotel lobby bigger than my head. Are they real? Learning a drink of rum with lime juice. Very intense lime juice. The street to avoid because of the crack heads. The vendors coming in for the evening market hauling battered steel handcarts. Selling hammocks and lace, flowered dresses and cashews. Honey and carved Jesus. Same as it ever was. Commerce big and small driving the world.

But the faces, I’m so taken with the faces and I can’t help but think how differently the Conquest shaped North and South Americas. Here the mixing is embodied. It seems in the north people are still terrified of the mixing. I won’t idealize either side of the equator, but I will say I see the future in faces that are impossible to identify as any one cultural thing but more genuinely are the product of five-hundred years of intermingling and love embodied.

Editorials

• Guest Editorial, with Audio and Image Gallery
  “Migratory” by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Reynolds Chair of Creative Writing, University of Nebraska Kearney
• Almanac
  “Migrare: A Meditation in Three Movements” by Elizabeth Dodd
• Plein Air
  “The Art of Attraction” by Deborah Fries
• Field Notes
  “Para ser de uso” by Kathryn Miles,
• Bull Hill, with Audio
  “Throat-Singing vs. the Katydids of Glynwood” by David Rothenberg
• A Stone’s Throw
  “Migration in the Borderlands” by Lauret Savoy

Interview

• Every City Should Have an Atlas
  Chavawn Kelley Interviews Author Rebecca Solnit

To Know a Place

• Green Green is the Ground
  Essay and Photographs by Abeer Hoque, with Audio

UnSprawl Case Study

• Holiday Neighborhood
  Boulder, Colorado

Essays

• Buckeye
  by Scott Russell Sanders, with Audio
• Pilgrimage to the Magdalen
  by Fenton Johnson
• The Perilous Career of a Footpath
  by Howard Mansfield
• Say the Names
  by Lyn Baldwin, with Image Gallery
• Concerning couguar
  by Amanda Giracca
• Ghosts
  by Sharman Apt Russell

Articles

• Laramie: A Gem City Atlas Reveals an Uncharted West
  by Chavawn Kelley, with Image Gallery and Audio
• Holding Pattern: A Melon’s Cross-Border Journey from Farm to Fridge
  by Megan Kimble
• On the Trail of Mountain Lions
  by Melissa L. Lamberton
• Deepmaps: Reading Tim Robinson’s Maps of Aran
  by Eamonn Wall

ARTerrain Gallery

• Transit ~ Photographs
  Three sets of photographs and narratives from northern Japan and southern Arizona by Yozo Takada

Poetry

• Emma Trelles
  Three Poems with Audio
• B.A. Wingate
  One Poem with Audio
• José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes
  One Poem
• Eleanor Paynter
  Two Poems with Audio
• Katherine E. Young
  Three Poems with Audio
• Maureen Duffy
  One Poem with Audio
• William Auten
  Two Poems with Audio
• Arlene Kim
  Two Poems with Audio
• Melissa E. Jordan
  One Poem with Audio
• Derek Sheffield
  Two Poems with Audio, including Translation by Stephen Berard
• Julia Shipley
  Two Poems with Audio
• Julie L. Moore
  Two Poems with Audio and Image
• Ed Zahniser
  Two Poems with Audio
• Vandana Khanna
  One Poem with Audio
• Elizabeth Aoki
  One Poem with Audio
• Allen M. Weber
  Three Poems
• Pamela Uschuk
  One Poem with Audio
• J.D. Smith
  One Poem
• Grace Bauer
  One Poem with Audio

Fiction

• Latitude
  by Joanna Beth Tweedy, with Audio
• Bycatch
  by Tom Noyes
• If, Minnesota
  by Steven Woodward

Reviews

• A Paddler’s Journey Down a Modern Southern Riverway
  Hal Crimmel reviews My Paddle to the Sea: Eleven Days on the River of the Carolinas, by John Lane
• The Joy of Walking: Stories from an Outlaw Trail
  Megan Kimble reviews Pathfinder: Blazing a New Wilderness Trail in Modern America, by Ron Strickland
• Invisible Migrations
  Andrew C. Gottlieb reviews Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
• A Book, a Story, and Knock-Knock Joke or Two
  Simmons B. Buntin reviews Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis, by Sandra Steingraber

View our dynamic new issue at www.terrain.org.

The landscape around Craftsbury Common, Vermont.

It’s not often that I endorse something not affiliated with Terrain.org, but I wanted to take a moment — with the looming April 12th deadline — to promote the Wildbranch Writing Workshop, sponsored by Sterling College and Orion magazine in Craftsbury Common, Vermont. The weeklong workshop this year is June 24-30, and features Christopher Cokinos, David Gessner, and Ginger Strand as faculty extraordinaire. View all the details, and apply, here.

Wildbranch is the country’s foremost writing workshop for people interested in honing their ability to write honestly and powerfully about the natural world. In addition to the faculty, you spend time with and receive amazing feedback from members of the Orion editorial staff for a week of writing and conversation in the rolling hills of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. I remember well, for example, my canoe ride with Jennifer Sahn, Orion editor, which was both fun and informative. And she managed to pull me out of the dark water without too much strain following my mad and one might argue unexpected dive for loons. Better not to tell more of that story, however…

Jen and Chip Blake, Orion’s editor-in-chief, offer participants the option of a one-on-one critique of a piece of their writing. A limited number of manuscripts will be accepted for review on a first-come first-served basis and a 4,000-word limit applies. Those wishing to take advantage of this opportunity are asked to submit their work to the workshop director by June 1. I took advantage of it, and it helped considerably.

When I was there, in 2008, I had the good fortune to study under Scott Russell Sanders. Four years later, I still keep in close touch with my fellow Sanderlings, as we (nerdingly, I admit) call each other.

So if you’re a writer of any age or ability, with a deep passion for our natural world and how we find our place in it, you should sign up for the Wildbranch Writing Workshop. And enjoy those first-light birdwalks, too.

Sandhill cranes in the cornfields of southcentral Nebraska, along the Platte River. Look for a gallery of Sandhill crane migration images with Allison Hedge Cokes's guest editorial. Photo by Simmons B. Buntin.

We’ve pushed back the launch of Terrain.org to celebrate Earth Day (well, okay, we’re actually delayed just a bit, but the coincidence is nice). Look for the new issue with the theme of “Migration” at www.terrain.org on April 23rd.

And let us say right now that it’s a stunning issue, with poetry from the likes of B.A. Wingate, Derek Sheffield, Emma Trelles, Ed Zahniser, Eleanor Paynter, and many others; essays from Scott Russell Sanders, Sharman Apt Russell, Howard Mansfield, and others; fiction by Joanna Beth Tweedy, Tom Noyes, and Steven Woodward; To Know a Place (essay and photos) by Abeer Hoque; ARTerrain gallery by Japanese photographer Yozo Takada; guest editorial by Allison Hedge Coke; interview with Rebecca Solnit; articles on Laramie: A Gem City Atlas, mountain lions, climate change and migration, a melon’s cross-border journey, and Tim Robinson’s Maps of Aran; Holiday neighborhood in Boulder, Colorado, as the UnSprawl case study, and more!

So yeah, it rocks.

April 1st also brings us the opening of our new submission period, through August 1st. We are now accepting submissions for our announced upcoming themes: “Ruin and Renewal” and “Craft.” And we’ll announce a new issue theme when “Migration” launches, as well. And submissions are also open for our 3rd annual contests in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World

by Paul Gilding

Bloomsbury Press, 2012

Reviewed by Craig Reinbold

The world is in for a storm—rising temperatures and sea-levels, desertification, famine, all-out war for water and fuel, amassing refugees, economic meltdown, political instability, and from there, potentially, total global collapse—but activist-writer Paul Gilding doesn’t believe it will come to that. Among the climate-change doomsaying crowd, this author is the determined optimist in the room.

The end of the world as we know it, for Gilding, is less a disaster than an opportunity for a step in human evolution, “one driven consciously rather than biologically.” The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World is his long-titled manifesto on how this might be accomplished.

Gilding, the former head of Greenpeace International, focuses on the link between climate change and the global economy, arguing that it is the impulse towards unchecked growth that’s driving Earth’s climate out of control, and that subsequently this is where we will first feel the effects of climate change. Put plainly, “Let there be no doubt that if the environment crashes, the economy will go with it.” Gilding offers the global financial meltdown of 2008 as evidence of the current system’s failings and its inability to adapt and grow beyond itself: a foreshadowing of greater distress ahead.

“The problem we face is that we’ve conveniently ignored both the desirability and the inevitability of the end of growth, and as a result we haven’t planned for it. We have entwined our lives, our culture, our political systems, and our economic structures in such a complex web with the growth monster that separation, when it comes, is going to be complex and traumatic. The system is going to resist change and do so fiercely. It will take a serious crisis to force the issue,” Gilding tells us, “and that’s why that crisis is inevitably coming.” This point of global emergency—dubbed The Great Disruption—will be our last stop before global collapse, our last chance to curb consumption and adapt to a sustainable steady-state economy, which Gilding, ever the optimist, believes we will.

It seems Gilding is trying to round out a genre best known for its gloom. The work of James Kunstler (The Long Emergency), Steward Brand (The Eco-Pragmatist Manifesto), and James Lovelock (The Revenge of Gaia) is profoundly informative, and more depressing for it: the surfeit of data and the accompanying woeful prognosis for civilization as we know it breeds a tough-to-beat cynicism. Simply put, the truth hurts. The Great Disruption mostly avoids this mire by focusing not on the history and analysis of the problem, but rather on cheerleading a potential solution.  

Gilding’s solution—put forth in a section charismatically dubbed The One-Degree War—is provoking, if not exactly new. The One-Degree War Plan, co-written with professor of climate strategy Jorgen Randers, was originally made public on Gilding’s personal website in 2009. With this book, Gilding seems determined to reach a vaster audience, a laudable goal, though one wonders if the message could have been conveyed with a hundred fewer pages padding the crux chapter.

In summary, the first five years of the crisis will need a level of mobilization comparable to the U.S. entering WWII and a 50% reduction of net CO₂ emissions; the next fifteen will require a reworking of global infrastructure to eliminate CO₂ emissions completely; and the eighty years after that will mark a recovery period, a “long-haul effort to create a stable global climate and a sustainable global economy.” How exactly we might achieve this is laid out nicely (essentially, cutting CO₂ = less capital consumption = local, simple lifestyles = no more shopping) and the numbers seem to hold up under scrutiny, which is to say, Gilding’s plan is a fine plan, if no more realistic than any other.

This is the best part: Gilding gives us an actual timeframe—The Great Disruption is projected to begin before 2020. This is a risky move maybe, but he remains undaunted. The world as we know it will end, he emphasizes, if not exactly then, then eventually.

Gilding’s singular zeal does suggest a certain green-hearted fanaticism, which is to say he’s easily caricatured as that guy on the campus lawn with the microphone calling for the end of the world while daring us not to listen. It’s a troubling paradox that sometimes it’s easiest to ignore those who are shouting the loudest, and Gilding, like other Cassandras of the genre, recognizes this—he just sees no alternative. There is no time left to coddle. We need to take this impending crisis seriously: the clock is ticking down.

Current science tells us we’ve passed the tipping point on climate change, the markets are haywire, not just banks but countries are going bust, and it’s becoming ever more clear that growth may not merely slow down, but stop altogether if our global resources are not better managed. And yet, despite the evidence, with our supermarkets still full and gas prices more or less steady, Gilding’s assertion of impending doom is easily disregarded as hysterical. Only posterity can know. It’s possible history will come to view the meltdown of 2008 as a cultural tipping point, not as the beginning of the end of humankind, but the end of our beginning as we adapt and evolve beyond materialism, towards a higher human consciousness. Gilding would have us believe this is not only possible, but likely, that it’s only a matter of time. We cannot escape the coming crisis. We can only stop shopping, and push ourselves beyond it. “This is a crisis we can no longer avoid. The sooner we accept this and the better we prepare, the less suffering there will be and the faster we will come out the other side.”

There isn’t much new here—Gilding is reiterating a common refrain. Still, his enthusiasm is catching. And this may be his finest contribution to a genre that tends to inspire more despair than action.

~~~

Craig Reinbold’s work appears in recent issues of The Iowa Review, Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics, Copper Nickel, Swink Magazine and a number of other more or less literary places. He resides in Tucson with his wife and their dog, Olive, and can be reached at craigreinbold@gmail.com.

There are certain nights in the year when soft-shelled giants rise from the Indian Ocean. They have done so for millions of years. Approaching the Andaman and Nicobar Archipelago, they wait for an opportune moment to swim ashore, clamber up their natal beaches — or beaches close by — and lay a clutch of eggs. They are leatherbacks, the earth’s largest, most wide-ranging sea turtles, and their ancestors survived the rise and fall of dinosaurs. Ocean currents and Earth’s magnetic field have guided their migration of over a thousand kilometers from the waters around Sri Lanka and Australia and quite possibly beyond.

Leatherbacks are spread across the globe, as are their nesting sites. Endangered for much of their range, populations are now hanging by a thread in some areas (especially along the Pacific Coast) while relatively stable in others. Most that arrive in the Indian Ocean breed between November and March; a few continue to arrive well into July.  A female leatherback may lay four to five clutches of eggs before embarking on her return journey.

Dr. Kartik Shanker and his team of researchers and keen-eyed field assistants have been monitoring sea turtle nesting population along a seven-kilometer stretch of beach called West Bay, on Little Andaman Island. It is the night of January 6 and this season they have counted and measured 77 nests along the desolate stretch of tribal reserve that is off limits to the public.

My journey from mainland India to Little Andaman Island has taken weeks of permit applications, one hopping flight from New Delhi, two rides in ferry boats from Port Blair (the first turned back due to a sudden cyclone), hours tossing about in a dugout canoe (dhungi) with the sting of salt in eyes and taste buds, and, finally, endless night-hours on foot. And so far I have not spotted a single leatherback in over 30 kilometers of walking — spread over two and a half nights.

It’s now 2 a.m. on the morning of January 7, two days before this month’s full moon. I am completing my third round of patrol with filmmaker Rita Banerji and her assistant John Lakhra. Three field assistants are covering the second half of West Bay Beach. We split into two teams to increase our chances.

A rapidly blinking flashlight announces an arriving leatherback. It’s a faint signal, which means it’s coming from several kilometers away. We flash back: Got it, on the way. The tide is low, so it’s easy to race along the strip of compacted sand close to the waves. The flashlight is blinking again. Does this mean she is leaving?

I am grateful for light from the waxing moon — except for brief signaling, we cannot use flashlights (the other exception: crossing a creek that hosts estuarine crocodiles). After a good half hour of running, I see a shadowy form ahead. It is one of the field assistants, Kenny, who quiets us down before leading the way up past the reach of high tide. Ahead of him, Columbus, another field assistant, sits behind the leatherback, helping her dig. He crept up behind her undetected—stealth that has come with two years of practice. The rest of us have to stand back.

Her gurgling sighs are audible. Through binoculars, dimly, I see her head rise for another sigh before dropping back into sand. The vapors of freshly dug sand are mixed with a stronger scent, more pungent than seaweed. She is sitting in a shallow body pit that she created by flinging sand back with front flippers. She is still digging, so we must stand back ten meters away or she might desert the site. Carefully, slowly, her rear flippers create the gourd-shaped hole that will house her eggs for several weeks. Blind precision. Finally she goes into the trancelike state of laying some 80 eggs.

The documentation begins. Our cameras roll: Columbus, Kenny, and Tesoro count the eggs, measure the weight and diameter of the first ten, and measure the turtle herself. “This one looks kamzore,” Kenny whispers. She looks weak, he’s saying. At over two meters in length and a meter from her left front flipper to her right, she looks anything but kamzore to me.

So far, we learn, there are 78 nests in West Bay and it’s still mid-season. But about half the clutches have been destroyed by water monitors, the giant lizards that are the main egg predators here.

Will this clutch remain safe? Will the field teams install netting to protect nests in the future? Data from this season will help guide their conservation efforts.

Two hours later she covers her eggs and leaves us with all the unanswered questions. Her front flippers slam the sand, sending off sparks of bioluminescence. Ungainly on land, she enters the water and glides with ease.

~~~

For information on the Turtle Diaries Project, please visit: http://saveourseas.com/projects/turtle_diaries. Communities and organizations involved with India’s Turtle Action Group, TAG, can be viewed at http://www.seaturtlesofindia.org/?page_id=385.

View the new Turtle Diaries documenting this project now.

~~~

Maya Khosla is currently co-directing the Turtle Diaries Project with Rita Banerji. The project is supported by an award from the Save Our Seas Foundation. Maya’s poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2011. She received the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize for her book Keel Bone.

by Fred MacVaugh

It’s black, so black, in fact, you think of tar and oil. You see nothing, neither people nor light, for there is no light, not anywhere. Maybe you think of nights without moon and stars and luminous watches. Maybe you think of nothing at all. You can’t even see your hand waving mere millimeters in front of your face; if anything, you think you see a ghost-colored shadow. Even your breathing is indistinct, shallow and drowned out by a remnant static ringing in your ears. Is this the sound of deafness? you wonder. The residual roar of the Big Bang reverberating through eighty stories of limestone? What you’re hearing is blood sluicing through cave-dark capillaries. Ears hear everything. Every unexpected calcite-heavy plop and splatter of water on surrounding rock. You know what you can’t see: this rubble fell from high above your head.

That’s what it’s like when the lights are off on the King’s Palace tour at Carlsbad Caverns in southeastern New Mexico. You see what this cave was like before visitors, paths, and lights. Walk into Carlsbad Cavern by way of the Natural Entrance, the same route visitors since the 1920s have descended, and you too may sense a cave-kindled fear like cowhand James Larkin White. He first neared and peered into the pit-like entrance in 1901. The bats funneling by the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, into New Mexico’s cloud-spackled sky appeared from a distance like smoke. And he chose to check.

Much has changed since then. In October 1923, President Calvin Coolidge set aside 719.22 acres of cactus-covered sea-reef remnant above the Bat Cave, as it was locally known. The next year, geologist Willis T. Lee changed the name of King’s Palace to Shinav’s Wigwam and proposed blasting a tunnel into the cavern to allow tourists to drive their Model-T Fords, headlights blazing, around the Big Room. In size and extent, Lee compared it to Washington, D.C.’s Union Station.

In human terms, such was the beginning of Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Boosters foresaw tourists and business opportunity. Publicity surged and photographs circulated: Groups of twenty or a hundred tourists stilled in black-and-white and dwarfed in space and stalagmites. Word spread worldwide and visitors arrived by the thousands and marked their passage on cavern walls. They drank water from cave pools and trampled fragile rimstone. They scrambled over speleothems and pocketed cave pearls. What water, limestone, and age built a single plop at a time over thousands of years they shattered to smuggle home small samples. They left their money behind.

The consequences haven’t changed in eighty years despite lights and trails and handrails. Little, if any, rock has fallen and superlatives still fall flat as clichés. Stalactites, fewer now in number, cling to the ceiling like caramel-colored icicles. Some are thick as tree trunks. On the floor stand thirty-, forty-, and fifty-foot-tall stalagmites as ribbed as tree bark and wide around as hundred-year-old cottonwoods or young sequoia. There are columns, too, and draperies, helictites, and popcorn formations adorning the cavern walls. Paper-thin, hollow formations called soda straws, meanwhile, drip rainwater trickled down from the desert onto stalagmites, visitors, the cavern floor.

Lee wanted to name King’s Palace Shinav’s Wigwam (after a mythical Navajo deity) to commemorate the Southwest’s native inhabitants. Locals and visitors favored King’s Palace. The chamber was that elaborate, the image common enough and well understood. King’s Palace was a place people could imagine. Shinav’s sounded Chinese, one 1920s tourist said, and conveyed no meaning, no wonder.

Join the crowds on the trail into and through the cave today, and you hear Carlsbad Cavern is dying. Formations have ceased to grow. Park Service houses and cars parked in the desert above pollute the groundwater. Parking lots channel rainwater elsewhere. Except for moments of pitch-pure blackness in King’s Palace, people complain they can’t even hear their own hearts, the silence.

~~~

Fred MacVaugh has worked in national parks, studied English and history, and published a poem or two. Currently, he writes a weekly blog, “Dispatches from a Wild Mind,” for Precipitate: Journal of the New Environmental Imagination. 

So how do we make climate change—and science—headline-worthy without sensationalizing or simplifying nuanced issues? Dedicated science journalists, like Revkin, a pioneer in climate change communication, write well-researched and balanced stories, stories that focus on small narratives and human moments within the large, multi-faceted topic. But those stories often get buried by “news” and, increasingly, venues such as the New York Times and The Economist are not how young people—including myself—engage with new information. Indeed, in 2009, Andrew Revkin left the New York Times and now writes about climate change on his blog, Dot Earth, a platform that has allowed him to focus on innovative ways to tell the “news stories” of climate change that are enabled by the changing face of media.

So what are the appropriate new venues for telling stories? Via Tweet? On YouTube? I recently discovered this video, created by journalism students at NYU’s The Explainer, about fracking:

The song is catchy, the graphics are interesting—and it gives a basic overview of a timely and important issue for those who might skip over a New York Times story about this controversial issue. It engages—but is it accurate? The video certainly boils a very complex subject with still unresolved science into a series of sound bites, and offers more judgment than perhaps an unbiased assessment should—but, it engages. At the end of the day, which is more effective: A comprehensive, accurate, nuanced article in a newspaper or journal that reaches 30,000 readers, or a catchy YouTube clip—about science!—that goes viral and reaches 250,000 viewers?

I’m not sure I know. What I hope is that a video like this might pique interest—which would then be followed up by a more comprehensive study.

Do you think using YouTube and Twitter to communicate climate change trivializes the science, or does it make it more accessible? Is a reduction in complexity an acceptable tradeoff for engaging new participants in the conversation?

Dear Simmons,

Last September, millions of you joined us for 24 Hours of Reality, when we connected the dots between the reality of the climate crisis and the extreme weather events happening with greater frequency all over the world. Together, we saw that most of us don’t need to travel far to see the impacts of climate change. We are already feeling those impacts close to home — with bigger downpours of rain (and snow), bigger floods, and simultaneously longer and deeper droughts. Stronger wind storms have also taken a toll.

Yet the climate crisis is also causing momentous changes in remote regions far from major population centers, in places like Antarctica, Greenland, and the North Polar Ice Cap. Consider that Antarctica, the massive continent at the southern tip of our planet that is about the size of the United States and Mexico combined, holds 90% of all the ice in the world. In fact, it is covered in ice that, at some points, is two miles thick. As global warming increases the melting of that ice — and the movement of vast ice sheets from the continent into the ocean — what happens to the rest of the world?

To better understand the changes taking place near the South Pole and the impacts those changes will have around the world, I will be returning to Antarctica this month with The Climate Reality Project. A large number of civic and business leaders, activists and concerned citizens from many countries will join me during this voyage with many of the world’s leading climate scientists and Antarctica experts to see firsthand and in real time how the climate crisis is unfolding in Antarctica.

Learn more about Antarctica and our other expeditions to discover the reality of the climate crisis. Take a look at our Expedition Headquarters now:

http://climaterealityproject.org/thin-ice/

I first traveled to Antarctica in 1988. At the time, it was already clear that our southernmost continent stood at the frontier of the global climate crisis. Scientists expected that as climate change accelerated, Antarctica would be one of the fastest warming areas of the planet. This prediction has proven true: Today, the West Antarctic Peninsula is warming about four times faster than the global average. In many ways, it is the biggest “canary in the coal mine,” signaling one of the largest impacts of climate change for the entire world.

Even though Antarctica is thousands of miles distant from the rest of the world, the melting ice on this continent should be of paramount concern to all of us. As our planet’s ice melts, sea levels are rising steadily. This increases the risk of storm surges, coastal floods, diminished supplies of drinking water for billions of people, salination of agricultural land near low-lying coastal areas, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees — many of whom will cross borders and may carry with them an increased risk of political instability in the nations to which they move.

To better understand these impacts, we are encouraging our partners and supporters to organize their own “expeditions” close to home. Over the next few weeks, members of The Climate Reality Project will document how the melting of the world’s ice is having an impact on people from Brooklyn to Bangladesh and from the Arctic to Ecuador.

I hope you will join me and The Climate Reality Project as we explore how changes on the most remote continent of the world have become a part of our shared climate reality. And I hope you’ll take the time to explore the impacts climate change is having on your own community.

Learn more about how we are all “living on thin ice.” Take a look at our Expedition Headquarters, and check back again in a few days as we begin to report back about what are learning:

http://climaterealityproject.org/thin-ice/

Thanks for all you do,

Al Gore
Founder and Chairman
The Climate Reality Project

Oak: One Tree, Three Years, Fifty Paintings

By Stephen Taylor

Princeton Architectural Press, 2012

Reviewed by Andrew C. Gottlieb

There’s something comforting about the ability of an artist to focus solely on one object, and then to work to render that object over time in as many ways as necessary, perhaps until the need to render that object dissolves, whether that brings to the artist relief or depression. In Stephen Taylor’s new book, Oak: One Tree, Three Years, Fifty Paintings, an art book of 112 pages, plates and text, we have the privilege of peering into the world of a British artist who’s done just that.

Oak is a look at Stephen Taylor’s life over the course of about three years as he painted—in varying weathers, distances, lights, times of day—one oak tree. Thus, this book isn’t about trees, per se, nor paintings of trees, nor is it about oaks, in general. It is about Stephen Taylor’s methods—and the ways in which he studies color and uses technology are informative and interesting—it is about his painting, and it is also about his life history: all of this is the story of Stephen Taylor and his work. And it’s about one tree. But even more fascinating is that the book is really about Taylor’s ability to paint that one tree, over and over. And again.

Perhaps the most attractive quality of this book is simply that: insight into the meditative nature of Taylor’s work as an artist. Meditation, in the many traditions of Buddhism for which it plays a part, often recommends—to quiet the mind—closing one’s eyes and focusing on one imagined object. That object might be a candle flame, a spot of color, anything, really, that the practitioner chooses. Once past the freedom to choose an object, one quickly learns it’s remarkably difficult to prevent the mind from straying.

Outside a practice of meditation, one need not be reminded how difficult it is in today’s society to focus on anything, let alone the artistic recreation of one physical object. Writers and artists throw up their hands trying to find time to make art amid the needs of a job, a family, a life. Technology distracts; prescriptions—Ritalin—abound.

Focus like this is a rarity. Even for poets like Denise Levertov, who had an object like Mount Rainier as a talisman, the poems aren’t all about Rainier. How did Stephen Taylor get to a place where he could hike out into the same field for three years to look at and paint one oak tree? There are philosophies of art and objects that aren’t concerned with the backstory. Objects for object’s sake, authorial irrelevance. It’s possible to view, judge, and value these paintings of an oak tree by themselves, in a vacuum. If we do this, we lose the richness of Taylor’s life and work, the lesson of this artist. His story makes him human, and in the 20-page introduction, Taylor provides, succinctly though descriptively, a short history of his life up to The Tree. The critical point: in his late thirties, both his mother and a women he loved died of a brain tumor, the same disease. Shortly after, his father had a stroke and died.

There is grief here, but not sentimentality. Taylor tells us, “I found myself sitting in my childhood home, not quite knowing where I was.” This is about as emotional as Taylor gets. He keeps us linked to the art. “I grew up surrounded by oak trees,” he begins. He takes us through his university studies, early portraits, still lives. Then, following the tragic deaths he’d experienced, an invitation from friends to come and live on a farm in North Essex. Taylor spends the next seven years on this farm.

The plates are gorgeous and the text informative. Some of the work is impressionistic and some realistic, almost like a photograph. I read Oak in one sitting of several hours and spent some of the time showing various plates to my wife—who thought some photographs. The plates alone are vivid, often visibly textured, and enjoyable. The variation in lights and weathers provides a spectacular range of work about this one tree. I found myself flipping pages to compare. One of Taylor’s first realizations was that differences forced him to consider similarities: “I had not expected to see that, when placed next to each other, each oak study would look so distinct that they appeared to be different trees. They made me think about the ways in which there were the same tree.” (Italics his.)

There is science here. Taylor explains crop rotations in the field, soil nutrients, how oak trees replace limbs and prioritize leaf growth. He talks about the technology of his work, how he uses software to deconstruct elements of a photo to understand color variation, how he sees yellows across a plane, greens in a night sky, reds in a dusky blue sky. And he talks about his goals and aims, the more ineffable but crucial parts of any the artist’s drive. “I wanted to make an oak tree that felt both observed and imagined: an emblem embedded in vision.”

The book concludes with a 10-page instructional section. Putting this at the end of the book is a great choice, preventing the book from feeling didactic, and yet offering details on the process to educate the reader, making this more than a pretty coffee table book. Taylor, who teaches, explains about the use of a pochade box and how he approached learning how to paint swallows.

There is one thing I want to improve about this book and that’s its size. I want it larger. Almost a perfect square, about 11 inches to a side, Oak has content to justify a book twice its size. A glossy wrap, large plates. It feels too small now for its content. I want this to be a giant, a book that guests can slowly flip through, admiring the work, taking in the text.

The overarching fascination of the book and work is Taylor’s ability to paint one tree for three years. It’s similar to the focus of the late Roman Opalka’s mission to paint all the numbers, one by one, white on white, from 1 to infinity. One can only call this kind of focus admirable, refreshing, relieving, and for an artist, desirable, when considering the speed and chaos of the world’s information.

Taylor’s in-flight crows and swallows appear alive. One learns to see the red in Taylor’s blue skies. One becomes familiar with one North Essex oak tree, and one asks oneself, Could I focus this much, on one thing? Taylor shows us that in art, as in life, mantra as material can be exceptionally rewarding.

~~~

Andrew C. Gottlieb is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org. His work can be found online, in many print journals, and in his poetry chapbook, Halflives, (New Michigan Press.) Find him at www.andrewcgottlieb.com.