I first went to Kenya in 1975, for four months in the wilds of Nakuru. I studied vervet monkey behavior, climbed Mount Kenya, and, en route to the Indian Ocean, crossed the volcanic Chyulu Hills and the haunting red sands of Tsavo, where tens of thousands of elephants overwhelmed the landscape, causing one of the singular ecological holocausts of the twentieth century. I experienced the last vestiges of old Kenya, before the elephant hunting bans were put in place, when the Waliangulu still hunted elephants with poisoned arrows and Kenya felt like one of the last great frontiers on Earth.
Shortly after 9/11, my wife, Marie, and I went again to Kenya’s north, to visit the Turkana, who insist that the droughts have only manifested since the first appearance of the white man in East Africa. A medicine man—a seer—told us, “In the old days, there was always rain and the Turkana lived peacefully.” Today the rains no longer come when they used to. The Turkana believe that the elephant is next to God and that the sighting of an elephant signals rain is imminent. When Satan and God quarreled, they say, thunder and lightning shook the ground. Since God could not materialize he had to ask the elephant to go in his stead to respond to Satan’s thunder with his trumpeting calls. When the thunder ceased, Satan had departed, leaving the elephant lord over the land. Today the lack of elephants in the north, due to poaching, is believed by many Turkana to be an omen that rain will not come. The recent droughts, which have been some of the worst in decades—can they partly be explained by the near total disappearance of the revered elephant from Turkanaland?
The Samburu of Kenya believe that, like the seers who can foretell rainfall, the elephant knows when rain is coming. The sudden appearance of elephants after many months of drought suggests that rain is on the way. How the elephants know that the rains are approaching is a secret even the seers do not know. That knowledge is on the order of another language.
It was from the pastoral Samburu, whose relationship to the elephant is perhaps unique in Africa, that we were able to glean something of a sacred and remarkable alliance. After many trips to Africa, in September 2007 Marie and I took our son, Lysander, to touch the ground of East Africa for the first time. We were told by Pacquo, a Samburu elder from central Kenya, that during the peak of the elephant slaughter thirty years ago, a herd of twenty or more elephant orphans who had lost their entire family somehow managed to make its way to Samburu country, having traveled for days to reach a village where they were given sanctuary. Today the extant herd of elephants in the Matthews Range is due to the Samburu’s kindness and their acknowledgment of the elephant as an extension of their own being. Indeed, the Samburu as well as the Maasai have a concept—tenebo—which sees the coherence of elephant family dynamics as a model for human interrelationships.
One story told by Pacquo tells of a rogue elephant who was destroying crops in a nearby village. The elephant’s repeated intrusions prompted the authorities to threaten to kill it if the problem was not solved. A Samburu elder faced the elephant and somehow communicated that people were going to come and shoot it if it did not go away—and within a short while it disappeared in the bush. The elephant never returned.
Another story, which goes back decades, has taken on the status of legend. It concerns a Samburu tribesman, Lesematia, who lost a leg in the British army while fighting the Italians in Ethiopia during World War II. Many years later, back in Kenya, Lesematia was walking on crutches at dusk toward his uncle’s house when he noticed a pair of male lions stalking him, lions who knew he was a cripple. He thought to himself, What can I do? I am going to be eaten by lions. He pondered his predicament and realized he could call on his brother the elephant. He sat down and meditated on his elephant friends. Eventually, three elephants came and stayed with him, keeping the lions at bay, waiting the whole night next to Lesematia. When dawn finally arrived, and the lions had gone, Lesematia thanked his brothers the elephants as they returned to the bush. This story, firmly fixed in the oral tradition of the Samburu, expresses the uniqueness of the relationship between beings who have broken through the Berlin Wall of interspecies communication. It tells us, the dominant species, that we can either call out to the other, reach across the gulf that supposedly separates us, or reject at our own peril that which is not human.
Today, humanity needs to reach out to elephants and hear a singular voice, a mind that has evolved with us and influenced us biologically, culturally, and mythically, for our entire evolution. The trauma that elephants have experienced over the last few decades is not completely measurable by humanity. Indeed, only a few people have been willing to break the human/nonhuman gulf to insist that elephants—in killing villagers in India and Sri Lanka, in raping rhinos as they have done in South Africa, and in exhibiting post-traumatic stress disorder as documented by psychologist Gay Bradshaw—are exhibiting symptoms of a much larger malaise: the breakdown of not just habitat and family structure, but also of mind across an entire species. This breakdown is symptomatic of the unraveling of nature as we have known it. The irreplaceable bond we have had with the elephant is an alliance we need to salvage not only for the sake of the elephant’s future but for ours as well.
]]>Just ten years later things looked very different. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. And although the first commercial radio station didn’t begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone.
But despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them.
It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry—from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones.
In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”
Business leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. The emphasis should be put on work—more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”
By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption”—the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices . . . a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.”
Today “work and more work” is the accepted way of doing things. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but “higher productivity”—and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.
FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of the Age of Consumerism there were critics. One of the most influential was Arthur Dahlberg, whose 1932 book Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism was well known to policymakers and elected officials in Washington. Dahlberg declared that “failure to shorten the length of the working day . . . is the primary cause of our rationing of opportunity, our excess industrial plant, our enormous wastes of competition, our high pressure advertising, [and] our economic imperialism.” Since much of what industry produced was no longer aimed at satisfying human physical needs, a four-hour workday, he claimed, was necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic. “By not shortening the working day when all the wood is in,” he suggested, the profit motive becomes “both the creator and satisfier of spiritual needs.” For when the profit motive can turn nowhere else, “it wraps our soap in pretty boxes and tries to convince us that that is solace to our souls.”
There was, for a time, a visionary alternative. In 1930 Kellogg Company, the world’s leading producer of ready-to-eat cereal, announced that all of its nearly fifteen hundred workers would move from an eight-hour to a six-hour workday. Company president Lewis Brown and owner W. K. Kellogg noted that if the company ran “four six-hour shifts . . . instead of three eight-hour shifts, this will give work and paychecks to the heads of three hundred more families in Battle Creek.”
This was welcome news to workers at a time when the country was rapidly descending into the Great Depression. But as Benjamin Hunnicutt explains in his book Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day, Brown and Kellogg wanted to do more than save jobs. They hoped to show that the “free exchange of goods, services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources.” Instead “workers would be liberated by increasingly higher wages and shorter hours for the final freedom promised by the Declaration of Independence—the pursuit of happiness.”
To be sure, Kellogg did not intend to stop making a profit. But the company leaders argued that men and women would work more efficiently on shorter shifts, and with more people employed, the overall purchasing power of the community would increase, thus allowing for more purchases of goods, including cereals.
A shorter workday did entail a cut in overall pay for workers. But Kellogg raised the hourly rate to partially offset the loss and provided for production bonuses to encourage people to work hard. The company eliminated time off for lunch, assuming that workers would rather work their shorter shift and leave as soon as possible. In a “personal letter” to employees, Brown pointed to the “mental income” of “the enjoyment of the surroundings of your home, the place you work, your neighbors, the other pleasures you have [that are] harder to translate into dollars and cents.” Greater leisure, he hoped, would lead to “higher standards in school and civic . . . life” that would benefit the company by allowing it to “draw its workers from a community where good homes predominate.”
It was an attractive vision, and it worked. Not only did Kellogg prosper, but journalists from magazines such as Forbes and BusinessWeek reported that the great majority of company employees embraced the shorter workday. One reporter described “a lot of gardening and community beautification, athletics and hobbies . . . libraries well patronized and the mental background of these fortunate workers . . . becoming richer.”
A U.S. Department of Labor survey taken at the time, as well as interviews Hunnicutt conducted with former workers, confirm this picture. The government interviewers noted that “little dissatisfaction with lower earnings resulting from the decrease in hours was expressed, although in the majority of cases very real decreases had resulted.” One man spoke of “more time at home with the family.” Another remembered: “I could go home and have time to work in my garden.” A woman noted that the six-hour shift allowed her husband to “be with 4 boys at ages it was important.”
Those extra hours away from work also enabled some people to accomplish things that they might never have been able to do otherwise. Hunnicutt describes how at the end of her interview an eighty-year-old woman began talking about ping-pong. “We’d get together. We had a ping-pong table and all my relatives would come for dinner and things and we’d all play ping-pong by the hour.” Eventually she went on to win the state championship.
Many women used the extra time for housework. But even then, they often chose work that drew in the entire family, such as canning. One recalled how canning food at home became “a family project” that “we all enjoyed,” including her sons, who “opened up to talk freely.” As Hunnicutt puts it, canning became the “medium for something more important than preserving food. Stories, jokes, teasing, quarreling, practical instruction, songs, griefs, and problems were shared. The modern discipline of alienated work was left behind for an older . . . more convivial kind of working together.”
This was the stuff of a human ecology in which thousands of small, almost invisible, interactions between family members, friends, and neighbors create an intricate structure that supports social life in much the same way as topsoil supports our biological existence. When we allow either one to become impoverished, whether out of greed or intemperance, we put our long-term survival at risk.
Our modern predicament is a case in point. By 2005 per capita household spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) was twelve times what it had been in 1929, while per capita spending for durable goods—the big stuff such as cars and appliances—was thirty-two times higher. Meanwhile, by 2000 the average married couple with children was working almost five hundred hours a year more than in 1979. And according to reports by the Federal Reserve Bank in 2004 and 2005, over 40 percent of American families spend more than they earn. The average household carries $18,654 in debt, not including home-mortgage debt, and the ratio of household debt to income is at record levels, having roughly doubled over the last two decades. We are quite literally working ourselves into a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines can produce.
Yet we could work and spend a lot less and still live quite comfortably. By 1991 the amount of goods and services produced for each hour of labor was double what it had been in 1948. By 2006 that figure had risen another 30 percent. In other words, if as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day—or 2.7 hours if we were willing to return to the 1948 level. We were already the richest country on the planet in 1948 and most of the world has not yet caught up to where we were then.
Rather than realizing the enriched social life that Kellogg’s vision offered us, we have impoverished our human communities with a form of materialism that leaves us in relative isolation from family, friends, and neighbors. We simply don’t have time for them. Unlike our great-grandparents who passed the time, we spend it. An outside observer might conclude that we are in the grip of some strange curse, like a modern-day King Midas whose touch turns everything into a product built around a microchip.
Of course not everybody has been able to take part in the buying spree on equal terms. Millions of Americans work long hours at poverty wages while many others can find no work at all. However, as advertisers well know, poverty does not render one immune to the gospel of consumption.
Meanwhile, the influence of the gospel has spread far beyond the land of its origin. Most of the clothes, video players, furniture, toys, and other goods Americans buy today are made in distant countries, often by underpaid people working in sweatshop conditions. The raw material for many of those products comes from clearcutting or strip mining or other disastrous means of extraction. Here at home, business activity is centered on designing those products, financing their manufacture, marketing them—and counting the profits.
KELLOG’S VISION, DESPITE ITS POPULARITY with his employees, had little support among his fellow business leaders. But Dahlberg’s book had a major influence on Senator (and future Supreme Court justice) Hugo Black who, in 1933, introduced legislation requiring a thirty-hour workweek. Although Roosevelt at first appeared to support Black’s bill, he soon sided with the majority of businessmen who opposed it. Instead, Roosevelt went on to launch a series of policy initiatives that led to the forty-hour standard that we more or less observe today.
By the time the Black bill came before Congress, the prophets of the gospel of consumption had been developing their tactics and techniques for at least a decade. However, as the Great Depression deepened, the public mood was uncertain, at best, about the proper role of the large corporation. Labor unions were gaining in both public support and legal legitimacy, and the Roosevelt administration, under its New Deal program, was implementing government regulation of industry on an unprecedented scale. Many corporate leaders saw the New Deal as a serious threat. James A. Emery, general counsel for the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), issued a “call to arms” against the “shackles of irrational regulation” and the “back-breaking burdens of taxation,” characterizing the New Deal doctrines as “alien invaders of our national thought.”
In response, the industrial elite represented by NAM, including General Motors, the big steel companies, General Foods, DuPont, and others, decided to create their own propaganda. An internal NAM memo called for “re-selling all of the individual Joe Doakes on the advantages and benefits he enjoys under a competitive economy.” NAM launched a massive public relations campaign it called the “American Way.” As the minutes of a NAM meeting described it, the purpose of the campaign was to link “free enterprise in the public consciousness with free speech, free press and free religion as integral parts of democracy.”
Consumption was not only the linchpin of the campaign; it was also recast in political terms. A campaign booklet put out by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency told readers that under “private capitalism, the Consumer, the Citizen is boss,” and “he doesn’t have to wait for election day to vote or for the Court to convene before handing down his verdict. The consumer ‘votes’ each time he buys one article and rejects another.”
According to Edward Bernays, one of the founders of the field of public relations and a principal architect of the American Way, the choices available in the polling booth are akin to those at the department store; both should consist of a limited set of offerings that are carefully determined by what Bernays called an “invisible government” of public-relations experts and advertisers working on behalf of business leaders. Bernays claimed that in a “democratic society” we are and should be “governed, our minds . . . molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
NAM formed a national network of groups to ensure that the booklet from J. Walter Thompson and similar material appeared in libraries and school curricula across the country. The campaign also placed favorable articles in newspapers (often citing “independent” scholars who were paid secretly) and created popular magazines and film shorts directed to children and adults with such titles as “Building Better Americans,” “The Business of America’s People Is Selling,” and “America Marching On.”
Perhaps the biggest public relations success for the American Way campaign was the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The fair’s director of public relations called it “the greatest public relations program in industrial history,” one that would battle what he called the “New Deal propaganda.” The fair’s motto was “Building the World of Tomorrow,” and it was indeed a forum in which American corporations literally modeled the future they were determined to create. The most famous of the exhibits was General Motors’ 35,000-square-foot Futurama, where visitors toured Democracity, a metropolis of multilane highways that took its citizens from their countryside homes to their jobs in the skyscraper-packed central city.
For all of its intensity and spectacle, the campaign for the American Way did not create immediate, widespread, enthusiastic support for American corporations or the corporate vision of the future. But it did lay the ideological groundwork for changes that came after the Second World War, changes that established what is still commonly called our post-war society.
The war had put people back to work in numbers that the New Deal had never approached, and there was considerable fear that unemployment would return when the war ended. Kellogg workers had been working forty-eight-hour weeks during the war and the majority of them were ready to return to a six-hour day and thirty-hour week. Most of them were able to do so, for a while. But W. K. Kellogg and Lewis Brown had turned the company over to new managers in 1937.
The new managers saw only costs and no benefits to the six-hour day, and almost immediately after the end of the war they began a campaign to undermine shorter hours. Management offered workers a tempting set of financial incentives if they would accept an eight-hour day. Yet in a vote taken in 1946, 77 percent of the men and 87 percent of the women wanted to return to a thirty-hour week rather than a forty-hour one. In making that choice, they also chose a fairly dramatic drop in earnings from artificially high wartime levels.
The company responded with a strategy of attrition, offering special deals on a department-by-department basis where eight hours had pockets of support, typically among highly skilled male workers. In the culture of a post-war, post-Depression U.S., that strategy was largely successful. But not everyone went along. Within Kellogg there was a substantial, albeit slowly dwindling group of people Hunnicutt calls the “mavericks,” who resisted longer work hours. They clustered in a few departments that had managed to preserve the six-hour day until the company eliminated it once and for all in 1985.
The mavericks rejected the claims made by the company, the union, and many of their co-workers that the extra money they could earn on an eight-hour shift was worth it. Despite the enormous difference in societal wealth between the 1930s and the 1980s, the language the mavericks used to explain their preference for a six-hour workday was almost identical to that used by Kellogg workers fifty years earlier. One woman, worried about the long hours worked by her son, said, “He has no time to live, to visit and spend time with his family, and to do the other things he really loves to do.”
Several people commented on the link between longer work hours and consumerism. One man said, “I was getting along real good, so there was no use in me working any more time than I had to.” He added, “Everybody thought they were going to get rich when they got that eight-hour deal and it really didn’t make a big difference. . . . Some went out and bought automobiles right quick and they didn’t gain much on that because the car took the extra money they had.”
The mavericks, well aware that longer work hours meant fewer jobs, called those who wanted eight-hour shifts plus overtime “work hogs.” “Kellogg’s was laying off people,” one woman commented, “while some of the men were working really fantastic amounts of overtime—that’s just not fair.” Another quoted the historian Arnold Toynbee, who said, “We will either share the work, or take care of people who don’t have work.”
PEOPLE IN THE DEPRESSION-WRACKED 1930s, with what seems to us today to be a very low level of material goods, readily chose fewer work hours for the same reasons as some of their children and grandchildren did in the 1980s: to have more time for themselves and their families. We could, as a society, make a similar choice today.
But we cannot do it as individuals. The mavericks at Kellogg held out against company and social pressure for years, but in the end the marketplace didn’t offer them a choice to work less and consume less. The reason is simple: that choice is at odds with the foundations of the marketplace itself—at least as it is currently constructed. The men and women who masterminded the creation of the consumerist society understood that theirs was a political undertaking, and it will take a powerful political movement to change course today.
Bernays’s version of a “democratic society,” in which political decisions are marketed to consumers, has many modern proponents. Consider a comment by Andrew Card, George W. Bush’s former chief of staff. When asked why the administration waited several months before making its case for war against Iraq, Card replied, “You don’t roll out a new product in August.” And in 2004, one of the leading legal theorists in the United States, federal judge Richard Posner, declared that “representative democracy . . . involves a division between rulers and ruled,” with the former being “a governing class,” and the rest of us exercising a form of “consumer sovereignty” in the political sphere with “the power not to buy a particular product, a power to choose though not to create.”
Sometimes an even more blatant antidemocratic stance appears in the working papers of elite think tanks. One such example is the prominent Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s 1975 contribution to a Trilateral Commission report on “The Crisis of Democracy.” Huntington warns against an “excess of democracy,” declaring that “a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.” Huntington notes that “marginal social groups, as in the case of the blacks, are now becoming full participants in the political system” and thus present the “danger of overloading the political system” and undermining its authority.
According to this elite view, the people are too unstable and ignorant for self-rule. “Commoners,” who are viewed as factors of production at work and as consumers at home, must adhere to their proper roles in order to maintain social stability. Posner, for example, disparaged a proposal for a national day of deliberation as “a small but not trivial reduction in the amount of productive work.” Thus he appears to be an ideological descendant of the business leader who warned that relaxing the imperative for “more work and better work” breeds “radicalism.”
As far back as 1835, Boston workingmen striking for shorter hours declared that they needed time away from work to be good citizens: “We have rights, and we have duties to perform as American citizens and members of society.” As those workers well understood, any meaningful democracy requires citizens who are empowered to create and re-create their government, rather than a mass of marginalized voters who merely choose from what is offered by an “invisible” government. Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption.
We can break that cycle by turning off our machines when they have created enough of what we need. Doing so will give us an opportunity to re-create the kind of healthy communities that were beginning to emerge with Kellogg’s six-hour day, communities in which human welfare is the overriding concern rather than subservience to machines and those who own them. We can create a society where people have time to play together as well as work together, time to act politically in their common interests, and time even to argue over what those common interests might be. That fertile mix of human relationships is necessary for healthy human societies, which in turn are necessary for sustaining a healthy planet.
If we want to save the Earth, we must also save ourselves from ourselves. We can start by sharing the work and the wealth. We may just find that there is plenty of both to go around.
]]>According to surveys commissioned by the California Tree Fruit Agreement, the most sought-after fruit demographic is a group called Summer Enthusiasts. What unifies this sunny cabal, alongside their above-average fruit purchases, is an interest in playing sports and (say the following with a robot voice) having new experiences. Summer Enthusiasts “believe having fun is the point of life, think continuing to learn throughout life is very important, believe enjoying life and doing the things they want to do is important.” Over 111 million Americans—in an estimated 53 percent of households—are Summer Enthusiasts.
Another important fruit-buying subset is Light Lifestylers—people who are health conscious and like to exercise. Overlapping somewhat with the Summer Enthusiasts are 72 million Super Moms and Dads—the type who verify ingredients and nutrition stats prior to buying, and for whom family is everything. By far the most elusive segment of the population is Generation Starbucks—youngish people who still believe they are invincible (so health isn’t a purchasing factor). These twenty- and thirtysomethings buy whenever the urge strikes them. Reaching the portion of this group with “positive life attributes” (i.e., not the suicidal, bearded nihilists) requires making fruits available everywhere, like their namesake java.
For all of these various menageries, fruits are pushed as a main ingredient in break-time snacking. Branding gurus want to make fruits a part of transitions from one activity to the next: rejuvenating tide-me-over breaks, midafternoon pick-me-ups, and after-work snacks. To merchandising reps, it doesn’t really matter when these moments happen as long as they become ritualized routines filled with fruit. Once fruits have become ingrained as the go-to transitionary fuel, their multisensory experiential qualities can be leveraged into high-volume snacking. Or something to that effect.
Fruit catchphrases and slogans bandied about in these studies include “little taste adventure,” “delicious handful of goodness,” and my favorite: “the snack that quenches.” Like a lingering stereotype, these studies’ undertones are shrouded in a gauzy cloak of believability. After poring over them for several hours, I badly need a transitionary moment. Despite, or perhaps because of, all the viral jargon, I feel an urge to go to my fridge and eat a peach. It certainly appears to be a “guilt-free treat,” rather than an endorsement of big agriculture. Then I bite into it, my teeth sinking into what feels like wet sand. Not quite the “burst of fun” I was hoping for.
]]>It was a boy, about six years old. He was standing on his seat screaming, “My mom’s having a seizure!” The only part of his mom I could see were her legs, sticking out into the aisle, convulsing. And arrayed around the train car were forty other people, mouths open. Not one of them doing a thing.
Humans tend to freeze like this—the Bystander Effect, it’s called. It was first demonstrated in a famous psychology experiment by John Darley and Bibb Latané in which the subject was asked to fill out some forms. He or she assumed these forms were preparatory to the experiment, but the experiment had already begun. While the person circled multiple-choice answers, smoke began to sneak out of a vent in the room. Thick, gray smoke. The kind that says fire. The experimenter then timed how long it took for the subject to leave the room.
The only variable was whether there were other people in the room. These people pretended to be subjects also, but actually they were actors paid by the experimenter to stay there, heads down, pencils working, ignoring the smoke. If the subject was alone in the room, 75 percent of the time she or he would leave inside of a minute. But if there were others in the room working away on their forms, the subject would stay there with them—90 percent of the time. Stay there filling out forms until the smoke was too thick to see through. Until, if there had been a fire, it would have been licking at the walls.
In the decades since that first experiment, it’s been repeated with many variations on the type of emergency: staged robberies, lost wallets, people in hallways crying for help, etc. Every time, if there was more than one person witnessing the event, all of them were almost certain to do nothing.
So the boy on the train was loudly identifying this as a true emergency, his mother physically demonstrating the urgency of the matter. Still everyone sat there, mouths open. Half of them had cell phones, but not one of them was dialing 9-1-1. Remember this fact: although we feel safer in a crowd, that’s actually where humans are most incapacitated. The bigger the crowd, the stronger the effect.
Right now everyone understands that something truly horrible is happening to the planet’s climate. The heat waves and forest fires, the floods and droughts. But there are 6 billion of us now—quite the Bystander Effect. So we stay in our seats filling out forms, trying to ignore the smoke swirling thicker around us. We bustle about our normal lives, assuming it can’t be as bad as it seems because surely, then, everyone would be marching in the street about it.
On the train with the epileptic mother, I stepped forward, yelling out, “Someone call 9-1-1! Someone get the conductor!” I knew about the Bystander Effect, had studied it in school, and knowing about the effect, it turns out, inoculates you against it.
Before I moved, everyone’s faces had been contorted with terror—as though they were the ones having the seizure, or as though this woman thrashing around like a dying fish might be about to start biting their ankles. But from the moment I stepped forward, telling them what to do, the fear in their faces melted away. Two other people stood up to help. Four others whipped out their cell phones to call 9-1-1. One person ran for the conductor. They just needed someone to break the group cohesion and start the action.
A few years ago, when my first child was born, I became paralyzed with fear about climate disruption. It was so clear that our children would be punished for what we adults were doing to the world. I got depressed. I got anxious. Then, from sheer desperation, I started writing letters to editors. I remember well the first one that got published. It was in the Boston Globe, and it supported building Cape Wind, the large wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound. The head of Cape Wind called me up personally to thank me. The thrill I got. The sense of agency.
After that I was out of my seat. I believed there was a safe room I could try to get to if I moved super quick. Now I go to every demonstration. I write to every politician.
I insulate my house fanatically. I don’t own a car. Every year I do a little more: composting kitchen waste, shopping at farmers’ markets, recycling, buying only secondhand. Using carbon calculators, I’ve figured that I’ve lowered my family’s emissions 50 percent in seven years. That’s a big step. Because of my actions, my fear for my children’s future is not incapacitating. I’m striding down the aisle trying to help. Not only have I improved my emotional state, I’ve broken group cohesion and started to pull others from their seats. I’ve gotten friends and relatives to insulate more and drive less, to admit the problem and start thinking about the solution.
Scientists tell us we have ten years, if that, to make significant changes. Every indication, from ice caps to defrosting tundra, seems to show this is the tipping point. This is our moment. Perhaps you never thought you’d get a chance to play hero. Here it is. The kid on the train is screaming out for help. The weather is convulsing. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t sure what to do. Make your best guess. Call 9-1-1. For god’s sake, get the conductor.
]]>All of which means it’s time to face a fundamental truth: the majority of the world’s climate scientists have been totally wrong. They’ve failed us completely. Not concerning the basics of global warming. Of course the climate is changing. Of course humans are driving the process through fossil fuel combustion and deforestation. No, what the scientists have been wrong about—and I mean really, really wrong—is the speed at which it’s all occurring. Our climate system isn’t just “changing.” It’s not just “warming.” It’s snapping, violently, into a whole new regime right before our eyes. A fantastic spasm of altered weather patterns is crashing down upon our heads right now.
The only question left for America is this: can we snap along with the climate? Can we, as the world’s biggest polluter, create a grassroots political uprising that emerges as abruptly as a snap of the fingers? A movement that demands the clean-energy revolution in the time we have left to save ourselves? I think we can do it. I hope we can do it. Indeed, the recent political “snap” in Australia, where a devastating and unprecedented drought made climate change a central voting issue and so helped topple a Bush-like government of deniers, should give us encouragement.
But time is running out fast for a similar transformation here.
A CLIMATE SNAP? REALLY? It sounds so much like standard fear-mongering and ecohyperbole. But here’s proof: One of the most prestigious scientific bodies in the world, the group that just shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for its climate work, predicted fourteen months ago that unchecked global warming could erase all of the Arctic Ocean’s summertime ice as early as 2070. Then, just two months later, in April 2007, a separate scientific panel released data indicating that the 2070 mark was way off, suggesting that ice-free conditions could come to the Arctic as early as the summer of 2030. And as if this acceleration weren’t enough, yet another prediction emerged in December 2007. Following the year’s appalling melt season, in which vast stretches of Arctic ice the size of Florida vanished almost weekly at times, a credible new estimate from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, indicated there could be zero—zero—summer ice in the Arctic as early as 2013.
Five precious years. An eye-blink away.
So the Arctic doomsday prediction has gone from 2070 to 2013 in just eleven months of scientific reporting. This means far more than the likely extinction of polar bears from drowning and starvation. A world where the North Pole is just a watery dot in an unbroken expanse of dark ocean implies a planet that, well, is no longer planet Earth. It’s a world that is destined to be governed by radically different weather patterns. And it’s a world that’s arriving, basically, tomorrow, if the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School has it right.
How could this be happening to us? Why is this not dominating every minute of every presidential debate?
Actually it’s the so-called feedback loops that have tripped up scientists so badly, causing the experts to wildly misjudge the speed of the climate crash. Having never witnessed a planet overheat before, no one quite anticipated the geometric rate of change. To cite one example, when that brilliantly white Arctic ice melts to blue ocean, it takes with it a huge measure of solar reflectivity, which increases sunlight absorption and feeds more warmth back into the system, amplifying everything dramatically. And as northern forests across Canada continue to die en masse due to warming, they switch from being net absorbers of CO2 to net emitters when forest decomposition sets in. And as tundra melts all across Siberia, it releases long-buried methane, a greenhouse gas twenty times more powerful than even CO2. And so on and so on and so on. Like the ear-splitting shriek when a microphone gets too close to its amplifier, literally dozens of major feedback loops are screeching into place worldwide, all at the same time, ushering in the era of runaway climate change.
“Only in the past five years, as researchers have learned more about the way our planet works, have some come to the conclusion that changes probably won’t be as smooth or as gradual as [previously] imagined,” writes Fred Pearce in his new book With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change. “We are in all probability already embarked on a roller coaster ride of lurching and sometimes brutal change.”
GLOBAL WARMING is no longer a hundred-year problem requiring a hundred-year solution. It’s not even a fifty-year problem. New data and recent events clearly reveal it’s a right-here, right-now, white-hot crisis requiring dramatic and comprehensive resolution in the next twenty to thirty years, with drastic but achievable changes in energy consumption required immediately. But even a near-total abandonment of fossil fuels might not be enough to save us, given how fast the planet is now warming.
So the rising whisper even among many environmentalists is this: we might also have to develop some sort of life-saving atmospheric shield. In a controversial but decidedly plausible approach called geo-engineering, we could do everything from placing giant orbiting mirrors in outer space to seeding the atmosphere with lots of sulfur dioxide, basically becoming a “permanent human volcano.” More on this in a moment.
But first, if there’s any good news surrounding the sudden and unexpected speed of global warming it is this: it’s nobody’s fault. New evidence shows that we were almost certainly locked into a course of violent climate snap well before we first fully understood the seriousness of global warming back in the 1980s. Even had we completely unplugged everything twenty years ago, the momentum of carbon dioxide buildup already occurring in the atmosphere clearly would have steered us toward the same disastrous results we’re seeing now.
So we can stop blaming ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal and the father-son Bush administrations. Their frequently deceitful lobbying and political stalling over the past twenty years didn’t wreck the climate. The atmosphere was already wrecked well before the first Bush took office. These staunch conservatives simply created a “solution delay” that we can—and must—overcome in a very short time.
The tendency toward denial is still very much with us, of course. From this point forward, however, there can be no hesitation and no absolution. In a world of obvious climate snap, any obstruction, any delay, from any quarter, is hands down a crime against humanity.
AMID THE SUDDEN need to rethink everything a.s.a.p. comes another piece of good news: the clean-energy solutions to global warming grow more economically feasible and closer at hand with each passing year. Europeans, with a standard of living equal to ours, already use half the energy per capita as Americans. If we just adopted Europe’s efficiency standards we’d be halfway to fixing our share of the problem in America.
We can’t do this? We can pilot wheeled vehicles on Mars and cross medical frontiers weekly and invent the iPhone, but we can’t use energy as efficiently as Belgium does today? Or Japan, for that matter? We can, of course. Wind power is the fastest growing energy resource in the world, and a car that runs on nothing but prairie grass could soon be coming to a driveway near you.
But to achieve these changes fast enough, the American people need a grassroots political movement that goes from zero to sixty in a matter of months, a movement that demands the sort of clean-energy policies and government mandates needed to transform our economy and our lives. We need a mass movement of concerned voters that “snaps” into place overnight—as rapidly as the climate itself is changing. Skeptics need only remember that we’ve experienced explosive, purposeful change before—quickly mobilizing to defeat Nazism in the ‘40s, casting off statutory Jim Crowism in a mere decade.
What just took place in Australia could be seen as a dress rehearsal for what might soon happen here in America. The underlying factors couldn’t be more similar. A historic drought (similar to current conditions in the U.S. Southwest and Southeast) with an established scientific link to global warming had become so bad by 2007 that 25 percent of Australia’s food production had been destroyed and every major city was under emergency water restrictions. The conservative incumbent government, meanwhile, had denied the basic reality of global warming for a decade, refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol. But voters were increasingly traumatized by the drought and increasingly educated. (Proportionally, twice as many Aussies watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth as Americans.) Against this backdrop, Labor Party candidate Kevin Rudd made climate change one of his topmost issues, talking about it constantly as he campaigned toward a landslide victory. It was good politics. The electorate had snapped into place and so had Rudd. His first official act in November was to sign Kyoto and commit his nation to a major clean-energy overhaul.
That time must come soon to America. November 4, 2008, would be a nice start date. And when we go, we must go explosively. Voters, appalled by the increasingly weird weather all across America—weather soon to be made worse by the bare Arctic Ocean and other feedback loops—must finally demand the right thing, laughing all the way to the polls over the recent congressional bill requiring 35 mpg cars by 2020. By 2015, we need to have cut electricity use by at least one third and be building nothing less than 50 mpg cars. And constructing massive and graceful wind farms off most of our windy seacoasts.
That’s our snap. That’s our glorious feedback loop, with political will and technological advances and market transformations all feeding off each other for breathtaking, runaway change.
BUT WILL IT BE ENOUGH? As inspiring and unifying and liberating as this World War II–like mobilization will be for our nation, it sadly will not. Getting off carbon fuels—though vital and mandatory—won’t steer us clear of climate chaos. We’ve delayed action far too long for that tidy resolution. Carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for up to a hundred years, and there’s already more than enough up there to erase all the “permanent” ice in the Arctic.
This leaves us with a huge decision to make. Either we fatalistically accept the inability of clean energy alone to save us, resigning ourselves to the appalling climate pain and chaos scientists say are coming, or we take one additional awesome step: we engineer the climate. Specifically, human beings must quickly figure out some sort of mechanical or chemical means of reflecting a portion of the sun’s light away from our planet, at least for a while. Whether you’re comfortable with this idea or not, trust me, the debate is coming, and we’ll almost certainly engage in some version of this risky but necessary tinkering.
First of all, forget the giant mirrors in space. Too difficult and expensive. And all those lofty notions of machines that suck CO2 out of the atmosphere? At best, they are many years away, with significant cost hurdles and engineering challenges still to be resolved. More likely, we’ll engage in some combination of cruder efforts, including painting every rooftop and roadway and parking lot in the world white to replace some of the Arctic ice’s lost capacity for solar reflectivity.
After that, all roads pretty much lead to Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. In 1991 that volcano erupted, spewing enough light-reflecting sulfur dioxide and dust into the atmosphere to cool the entire planet by one degree Fahrenheit for two full years. Could humans replicate this effect long enough to give our clean-energy transformation a chance to work? Can we artificially cool the Earth, using sulfur dioxide, even while the atmosphere remains full of greenhouse gases? Several very smart climate scientists, including Ralph Cicerone, current president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, think the idea is plausible enough to investigate thoroughly right now as a possible “emergency option” for future policymakers.
Ironically, we could “harvest” ample supplies of sulfur from modern coal-burning power plants, where it is a byproduct. In liquid form, sulfur could then be added—ironically, again—to jet fuel, allowing passenger aircraft worldwide to seed the atmosphere per scientific calibrations. In theory, we could even use powerful army artillery to shoot sulfur canisters into the atmosphere. But supply and delivery would likely be less of a challenge than the inevitable side effects, including an uptick in acid rain. And then there are the unknown and unintended consequences of subjecting the atmosphere to a multidecade or perhaps multicentury Mount Pinatubo effect. We would need an urgent research effort to assess the possible negative impacts of this process so we can devote resources to ameliorating at least the anticipated outcomes.
But the answer to the question Can human beings artificially cool the planet? is almost certainly yes. That answer, I realize, poses a terrible conundrum for conservationists like me who understand it’s precisely this sort of anthropocentrism and technological arrogance that got us into the mess we’re in. But like it or not, we are where we are. And I, for one, can’t look my ten-year-old son in the eye and, using a different sort of ideological arrogance, say, No, don’t even try atmospheric engineering. We’ve learned our lesson. Just let catastrophic global warming run its course.
What kind of lesson is that? I’d rather take my chances with global engineering and its possible risks than accept the guarantee of chaotic warming. As respected climate scientist Michael MacCracken has said, “Human beings have been inadvertently engineering the climate for 250 years. Why not carefully advertently engineer the climate for a while?”
SO HERE WE ARE, stripped of exaggeration and rhetoric, and hard pressed by the evidence right before our eyes. Our destiny will be decided, one way or another, in the next handful of years, either by careful decision-making or paralyzing indecision. We stand at a crossroads in human and planetary history. Or as my southern grandfather used to say, “The fork has finally hit the grits.”
Try as I might, I truly can’t imagine the Arctic Ocean completely free of ice by 2013, nor can I extrapolate all the appalling implications, from the end of wheat farming in Kansas to more record-breaking heat waves in Chicago. It truly is a terrifying time to be alive. But also exhilarating. As the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.”
The part of the picture that I can see is our own snap. I can see potent political change coming to America with our nation passionately joining the Kyoto process. I can see layers and layers of solution feedback loops that follow. I can see national policies that freeze and then quickly scale back the use of oil, coal, and natural gas. I see multitudes of Americans finally inspired to conserve at home, their money-saving actions feeding and amplifying the whole process. I then see consumer and governmental demand unleashing the genius of market systems and technological creativity, accelerating everything until we as a society are moving at geometric speed too, just like the climate, and suddenly our use of dirty fuels simply disappears.
Snap!
I can see my son coming of age in a world where the multiplier benefits of clean energy go far beyond preserving a stable climate. No more wars for oil. No more mountaintops removed for coal. A plummet in childhood asthma. A more secure, sustainable, and prosperous economy. Although there are surely dark times ahead, I can see him living through them, living deep into the twenty-first century, when most of the lingering greenhouse gases will have finally dissipated from our atmosphere, allowing an orderly end to the geo-engineering process.
Best of all, I see spiritual transformation ahead. We simply cannot make the necessary changes without being changed ourselves. Of this I am sure. With every wind farm we build, with every zero-emission car we engineer, we will remember our motivation as surely as every Rosie the Riveter knew in the 1940s that each rivet was defeating fascism. A deep and explicit understanding of sustainability will dawn for the first time in modern human history, moving from energy to diet to land use to globalization.
We will know, finally, that to live in permanent peace and prosperity we must live in a particular way, adhering to a particular set of truths about ourselves and our planet. To borrow from the great architect William McDonough, we will finally become native to this world. We will have lived through the climate threat, evolved through it, and our new behavior will emanate from the very core of our humanity.
We all do it. It is impossible to imagine, as you wander the halls of the latest gargantuan Westfield or Wal-Mart, that all this stuff—endless supplies of wine thermometers and shower radios, in-car phone sets and TV screens wider than your bed—is necessary, or even genuinely desired. Who could possibly buy it all? And yet, somehow, mysteriously, it gets sold. It’s not population-driven. Most Western populations are barely growing, scarcely replacing themselves without immigration. And yet each week we take home mountains and mountains of stuff. Like the gut flora of some poor, fixed creature, addicted to this bulimic cycle of buying, getting, and getting-rid-of, we extract what we want, or think we might want sometime, and excrete the excess—the packaging, the recycling, the half-digested junk.
Even in the throes of our addiction, however, we are increasingly aware that possession itself can become burdensome. Not-having can be stressful, but having can be more stressful still. The “endowment effect” underpins what happens when the negative effect of loss, or of fear-of-loss, outweighs both the pleasure of having and the negative of not-having-had. Once you’ve climbed the peak, there’s only one way to go. Down.
But that’s not all. As psychologist William James noted back in 1898, “lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being.” This has been the essential message not just of Christianity, but of many of the world’s major philosophies and religions for millennia. Now much contemporary study is devoted to finding scientific proof, or at least concurrence, for what we are no longer prepared, or able, to take on faith.
]]>Now imagine how different things have been for almost all of human history. Two hundred years ago, if an American wanted to eat a hamburger for dinner, he needed to be able to convince his neighbors to, say, help him build a barn in which to store hay to feed his cows all winter. And to help him harvest his wheat crop. Likely they would have come together to thresh it—there wasn’t a surplus of machinery. A neighbor would have slaughtered the cow and another would have baked the bread, unless it was all done in the family. The same went for what was considered women’s work. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, in a wonderful article in the journal Feminist Studies, showed that our notion of the self-sufficient farm family was bunk. There was a lot more to do than just berrying or washing or husking or quilting. Say you needed some homespun woolen cloth: there were eleven separate tasks involved, from herding sheep to dressing the fabric, and, as Ulrich noted, “it would have been an extremely unusual family that commanded the tools, skills, and labor to perform all of these steps at home. . . . What was true of wool was also true of flax,” she said, “for a family might grow its own; have it retted, swingled, and hackled by a flax dresser; bring it home for spinning and reeling; send it out to be woven; and then consign it to the bleach fields or dyer for finishing.”
Some of this exchange might have been paid for, much of it bartered, and a lot of it simply unaccounted for, since the reciprocal hand-lending was inevitable. Douglas Harper, in Changing Works, a poignant account of the dairy farms of northern New York, interviews farmers old enough to recall the time when “we would pitch in and go help. Everyone wasn’t so busy then. Oh, they had time or something.” You can read about it in Wendell Berry novels; if you want to still see it in operation, you may need to visit an Amish farm.
That’s because the advent of cheap fossil fuel, and the prosperity, globalization, and specialization it allowed, changed, well, everything for those who went along (which is to say, everyone but the Amish). You could look at almost any profession—baker to banker—but let’s stick with farming. When you depended on horsepower and human labor, you needed help. When you depended on high-powered machinery, you simply didn’t. Once you had a big combine, you could do it yourself. As one farmer told Harper, all of a sudden “there was no need, no call, really, to go see them. . . . I don’t think anyone has anything against anyone—you just don’t have any need to be there.” And all those machines let farms grow steadily bigger, which had as its logical result a far greater physical distance between the farm families who remained.
We could count this as simply the way of the world except for two problems.
One, of course, is that the era of cheap fossil fuel may be coming to an end, either because we run out or because we take global warming seriously and seriously cut back. Either way, the massive, invisible, industrialized methods we’ve come to rely on for feeding and clothing and fueling our lives may start to break down.
And the other problem is that we may break down. We weren’t designed to be this distant from our neighbors—we descend from apes who spend most of the day grooming each other for the practical purpose of removing lice and for the even more practical purpose of building the deep bonds that give their lives security and meaning. The economic life of Homo sapiens has always been about that kind of contact—until now, until us. Research has shown that when we live on car-filled streets, our number of close friends drops by half. We eat half the meals we used to with friends, family, neighbors. Forget about the flax-swingler; our clothes come through the ether from the mysterious geography of Lands’ End. We don’t need each other anymore, and that’s the saddest thing we’ve done—sadder even than the scourge of climate change, which at least is anonymous and impersonal.
Once we’ve started down this road, it’s hard to turn back; being a neighbor is a skill like any other, and it’s a skill we’ve increasingly lost as we’ve turned into hyperindividuals. Say you need the proverbial cup of sugar: do you turn to the neighbor or turn the car on and drive to the store? One survey found that three-quarters of Americans didn’t have a real relationship with the folks who lived next door. (New upscale houses now routinely come with dual master bedrooms, since even the talent for being a mate seems to be dwindling.) The big question for this century may turn out to be how fast we can relearn the skill of neighborliness.
Take farming again. The local food movement is helping to build demand for small farms. If it continues, we may someday reach the point where we once again have more farmers than prisoners in America—which will be a good thing, if we’re hoping to grow our food with less oil. But if that’s going to happen, it will take more than farmers’ markets—it will take farming communities, with enough small growers in the neighborhood to teach each other what needs doing. One of the best young farmers in my corner of Vermont, Spencer Blackwell, recently graduated from several seasons of growing grain and beans on the Intervale land in Burlington—a kind of incubator for young farmers with a dozen little start-up farms in any given year. “Maybe it was a little bit what it was like in the 1800s, when every other person was a farmer,” he says. “You need to know something—what’s the best time to plant oats as a winter cover crop—and there’s someone right around to tell you.” You can borrow equipment too, which is helpful because, as Blackwell points out, almost everything at the implement dealer is designed for mammoth farms. “I don’t want to grow a thousand acres of broccoli—I want to grow five acres,” he says.
For the rest of us, who aren’t planning to actually till the soil ourselves, relearning neighborliness means joining a CSA or going to the farmers’ market (where shoppers have ten times as many conversations per visit as they do at the Shop ‘n Save).
It means putting solar panels on our roofs and tying them into the grid so that our neighbors can cool their beer with the sunlight that falls on our shingles—and, of course, it means buying that beer from the local brewery. It means buying CDs when the artist is selling them after a concert, and listening to your local public radio station instead of the XM satellite-from-nowhere. It means not just supporting the idea of mass transit but getting on the darned bus sometimes.
It means embracing nonindependence—which to us may seem un-American, but in fact it is just the opposite. Tocqueville, in the greatest clichè of American political science history, called us a nation of joiners. We’ve gotten away from that—become a nation of drive-around-by-ourselfers. But in a world that seems likely to grow a little tougher all around, with weird weather, rising prices, and falling profits, a neighbor is what you’ll need most.
]]>To see more of James Proseck’s images, click here.
WHEN I WAS FOUR OR FIVE years old, I would draw birds at the kitchen table. As I finished each piece I asked my mother to write the names of the birds beneath the pictures: Cock of the Rock, Plate-Billed Toucan, Motmot. Somehow a picture wasn’t finished if the animal’s name wasn’t there.
When I learned to write, I scrawled the common and scientific names of each creature beneath my drawings myself—by example of Audubon, or any others who made paintings in the natural-history tradition. At nine I developed a passion for trout and began to compile a list of all the diverse types I could find in books and magazines.
In my mind, an animal was distinct from others if it had been given a scientific name. My view was that the classification of creatures was figured out by authority figures and that I should defer to that authority. In the process of painting different types of trout, though, I learned that even the authorities could not agree on the names they gave to describe the enormous diversity of fishes in the Salmonidae family. Some trout had been named a separate species and subsequently renamed a subspecies, placed in a different genus, or just pushed into a category with allied species. The history of the naming became as interesting to me as the physical diversity of the fishes themselves, which I loved to paint.
I wanted to believe that there were many more distinct creatures rather than fewer, because then I had more trout to paint and to put into what I hoped would eventually become a book of the trout of North America. I used any and all sources I could find in assembling what eventually did become my first book, Trout: An Illustrated History—a book of seventy watercolors. I had not yet explored the idea that naturalists named things because they wanted to create a legacy for themselves, or wished to be published more, or because of an innate human compulsion. I accepted the names without question—at least where there was consensus. Where there wasn’t, I either made an educated decision or included the argument over a species’ status in the text that would accompany each fish.
Since I had seen only a fraction of the trout I painted in my book, there was some amount of mythologizing and imagination involved. I had traveled across country with a friend for a summer when we were just old enough to drive, and we hiked and searched out native trout in many western states. The rest I painted from photos other people had taken and from descriptions in old books. A favorite source was David Starr Jordan and Barton Warren Evermann’s 1902 book, American Food and Game Fishes. Jordan, the first president of Stanford University, named a fair number of the native trout west of the Continental Divide, including some trout he described only from dead specimens. The “longfin char” of the Canadian Arctic was based on a tenuous description from a remote lake in Greenland. But Jordan was an authority, so I happily added his fish to my list, and painted it from his descriptions.
As I painted trout through my late teens, major shifts in trout taxonomy were taking place. Through genetic analysis, which was fairly new in the early ’90s, it was discovered that rainbow trout (from the Pacific coast) and brown trout (introduced from Europe) were not as closely related as once thought. The genes showed that the rainbow trout was more closely related to Pacific salmon, fishes that die when they spawn, of the genus Oncorhynchus. The brown trout was more closely related to the Atlantic salmon, and remained in the genus Salmo. The native trout of my home state, Connecticut, the brook trout, was actually a whole separate genus, Salvelinus, more closely related to the Arctic char than to the rainbow or brown trout. Technically, it was no longer correct even to call the book I was working on Trout. I found myself wanting to ignore the namers because they were getting in the way of my own personal vision.
I began to understand that species were less static than the fathers of modern taxonomy—those like Carl Linnaeus—once believed. That nature was static and classifiable was an idea perpetuated by the natural history museum (repository for dead nature), the zoo (repository for living nature), and the book (repository for thoughts and images related to nature). These mediums were all distillations of nature, what individuals of authority deemed an appropriate cross section to present to the public. None had adequately represented Nature—at once chaotic, multifarious, and interconnected.
In the process of painting and writing my second trout book, Trout of the World, I gathered most of the information firsthand during extensive travels through Europe and Asia. As I saw more of the world and its trout in person, a few things became clearer to me. A species like the brown trout, its native range stretching from Iceland to the Pamir Mountains of Kyrgyzstan, from the Kola Peninsula in Russia to Morocco, was highly variable. Pretty much every stream I pulled brown trout from, they looked different—not only every population, but every individual. There was no way that names could account for all this diversity. Were names then inadequate in the face of our changing relationship with, and view of, nature?
Ironically, despite the beauty and diversity I had witnessed, the differences between the fish I saw were not as great as I’d wished they’d been—not as great as the differences between the trout in my first book, when I accentuated characteristics that I had deemed important, based on bad photos and vague descriptions and colorful names. I was conflicted—I loved the names that had first led me to recognize the existence of diversity (golden trout, Oncorhynchus aguabonita; blueback trout, Salvelinus oquassa), but as I learned more I wanted to throw away the names, step beyond those constraints, in order to preserve a sense of wonder that I had felt from an early age.
Such thoughts were the origin of the curvilinear lines in my present work. For a long time I thought that my profession would be architecture, and that’s what I initially studied in college. The first paintings I did with lines emanating from creatures were meant to be imaginings of what God’s or Nature’s blueprint of a particular creature might look like. After drawing curvilinear lines, first emanating from the points on the body of a seahorse, I realized the lines were helpful as visual aids to point out particular parts of a creature that I wanted to bring attention to. The lines activated the space around the animal in a satisfactory way, erasing the need for the name to be written beneath. In this way, the lines became a very personal visual taxonomy, replacing the lingual one.
The lines in these works are also there to acknowledge that nothing is absolute, that even the laws of physics, though tested again and again, may one day buckle in the face of some unknown force. How can we say for sure otherwise? We willingly accept the way people in the past have viewed and arranged the world. Does bowing to that authority prevent us from looking at things with a fresh perspective? Naming gives us the illusion that nature is fixed, but it is as fluid as the language used to describe it. It is a challenge of the artist (if no one else) to un-name and re-name the world to remind us that fresh perspectives exist.
]]>The Antarctic is the logical place for her to have started.
Tom Griffiths, an Australian historian who visited the Antarctic in 2002–2003, put it this way in his book Slicing the Silence: “In Antarctica you are intensely aware of the celestial Earth.” The continent is not simply “the end of the Earth,” he says, but “a place from which to intellectually encompass the planet and a privileged human window on the universe.” Albuquerque’s large-scale installation Stellar Axis: Antarctica is the first artwork to fully take advantage of that privilege. It is part one of a two-part planetwide project meant to do a simple thing that bears complex results: remind us that the stars continue to shine during daylight and connect heaven to earth, or spirit to matter.
The Antarctic’s Ross Ice Shelf is the largest single piece of ice in the world, a flat expanse the size of Spain and up to a thousand feet thick. Albuquerque found herself standing there amid ninety-nine ultramarine spheres at midnight during the austral solstice of 2006. That would be winter in the north, but summer in the Antarctic. And that would be daylight here, not nighttime. She and her four teammates were working fifteen miles out from McMurdo, the largest base on the continent, where they installed the spheres, representing the ninety-nine stars of greatest magnitude in the Southern Hemisphere.
Albuquerque credits her fascination with the celestial vault to growing up in Carthage. She was boarded there in a Catholic convent and in the evenings would watch the stars rise and set over the twin horizons of the north African desert and the dark waters of the Mediterranean. She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1968 with a degree in art history and a fascination with ancient rock art and ceremonial sites. By 1978 she was strewing rocks and dry pigments across the floor of the Mojave Desert, early versions of her constellation pieces. In 1980 she turned the Washington Monument into the gnomon of a giant sundial in the nation’s capital, and in 1996 she created a star field around the pyramids of Egypt, alluding to their astronomical orientation. The Stellar Axis operation is her most ambitious project to date.
Two specific ideas compelled Albuquerque to create Stellar Axis. First, by mirroring constellations on the ground, her project would remind us that the stars are always with us, no matter how obscured by the position of the Earth. She would reverse the figure-to-ground relationship of stars to sky at solstice. The white ice would become the black sky, the dark blue spheres the light of shining stars.
Her other idea was based on what we call diurnal motion: as the Earth rotates west to east, the stars seem to move in the opposite direction. If you are standing in the Northern Hemisphere, the stars appear to rotate counterclockwise around the Pole Star. If you are standing in the Southern Hemisphere, they appear to rotate in a clockwise direction. If you imagine light from the two apparent motions meeting in the center of the Earth, the geometrical figure created would be a double helix, a spiral with a constant diameter like a strand of DNA. Albuquerque visualized this helix as a metaphor for information passed down over time, whether through the light of stars or through our genes.
She enlisted the help of Simon Balm, an astrophysicist who had worked previously at the South Pole. Simon had the math skills and field experience to transfer the positions of the stars into an accurate configuration on the ice. The artist and astrophysicist were joined by photographer Jean de Pomereu, filmmaker Sophie Pegrum, and cinematographer Lionel Cousin, all of whom would document the event but also help install the spheres representing the stars.
Their preparations took more than two years. In order to pull off such a large project in the Antarctic, it was necessary to obtain the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), which administers America’s science operations on the ice as well as projects by visiting artists and writers. Albuquerque’s challenge was to piggyback her team and materials onto the existing stream of supplies for the scientists. It’s a cost-effective strategy for the government, relatively friendly to the environment, but a nightmare to implement.
For example, Albuquerque’s spheres had to be manufactured so that they could be packed in halves, both so they would fit in the available cargo and so they could be reassembled solely by her team under the challenging conditions on the ice shelf. Then snow anchors had to be devised so that the spheres would not blow away and violate Antarctic Treaty provisions regarding waste on the continent. In fact, the NSF required her to subject the spheres to 110-mile-per-hour winds in a test tunnel.
On December 7, Albuquerque and her team, along with a gaggle of scientists, arrived at McMurdo aboard a cargo jet. After a week sorting their gear—and completing the survival courses required before being let loose on the ice—they headed out with the first of their six crates of stars. The NSF had assigned them a four-hundred-foot-diameter plot out near the ice runways, a two-hour drive on snow machines over the ice shelf. The site offered a pristine view of Ross Island and the perpetually steaming Mount Erebus, the world’s southernmost active volcano. It was a sublime place to work during the evenings with the sun only a few degrees above the horizon.
After Albuquerque selected what she thought would make the most aesthetic center for her work, Balm bored out a hole for the first pole with a gasoline-powered drill, then set out the forty-eight-inch sphere representing Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, were it visible. The deep blue sphere seemed to barely touch the ice, to almost float above the surface as if unsure whether it belonged to the sky or the ground.
It was December 14, and the solstice was on the twenty-second. All ninety-eight other “stars,” of descending magnitudes and represented by graduated spheres in seven steps down to ten inches, were aligned from Balm’s hole according to his GPS, the array representing the entire dome of the “night” sky from horizon to horizon. It took the team all nine days to install Stellar Axis, a job that in a more benign environment could have been done in two; but they made it just in time for fifty-one people from McMurdo to troop out on midsummer and gather at the center of the piece.
Albuquerque and Balm had stomped out an Archimedean spiral that wound into the array—the same kind of constant radius spiral found in DNA. Everyone walked along the path for ten minutes until meeting at the endpoint, then walked back out while being filmed from a helicopter, their heavy red parkas in contrast with the dusky blue spheres. At the conclusion, they spontaneously fell backward and made snow angels.
“I can’t help but think that Paleolithic people mirrored stars on the ground,” Albuquerque mused during an interview in Santa Monica one afternoon upon returning. “There’s archeological evidence that they did so in many sites around the world.” It would have been part of their quest for the numinous, the tradition in which she places her work. But her more immediate concern is how she will create the second half of the Stellar Axis project. When Balm drew an imaginary line from their site on the Ross Ice Shelf through the center of the planet, he ended up with a spot just off the coast of Greenland. They can get there, or close enough, on a charter ship, but how to deal with spheres in the water is something she and Balm haven’t yet solved. When they do, and when the other half of this artwork is realized, Albuquerque will have completed one of the largest gestures made by an artist on behalf of the marriage between the constellations and Earth.
]]>For more information, see the artist’s blog.
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The video above was shot by Ruytaro Ishikane and Robin Vachal. Edited by Jennifer Monson. Danced by Maggie Bennett, Charlotte Gibbons and Mariangela Lopez, sound by Kenta Nagai.
IT’S A BRIGHT SUNDAY MORNING during the fall migration in New York City. A small group convenes in Highland Park, a plateau of greenery straddling the border between Brooklyn and Queens. Most of the fifteen or so people—retirement age, in mesh hats, with binoculars slung round their necks—are of the urban genus known as Birder. A few obvious outsiders lack binoculars: a young reporter from the Queens TimesLedger ("Nothing else is happening today,” he says), a Queens woman with her tween daughter, a choreographer, and me and my boyfriend, Bob. The equipment shortage is soon rectified: two New York City Urban Park Rangers in khakis, utility belts, and Smokey-the-Bear hats arrive and begin handing out binoculars.
“This is a bird walk?” Bob asks, looking betrayed.
I convinced him to get up early and take the subway to Highland Park by telling him we were going to see some decommissioned hydroinfrastructure. Bob loves hydroinfrastructure. Birds he can take or leave.
Kids climb on playground equipment nearby and a radio loudly preaches the morning’s sermon. Twenty feet away, the Q56 bus zooms down Jamaica Avenue, sounding like a small boy revving an imaginary race car. As the rangers introduce themselves, the birders, in unison, begin slathering on sunscreen.
“I can’t wait to see the reservoir,” the Queens woman announces. “I haven’t been here since I was a kid. We used to come and swim in it. The helicopters would chase us away.” It isn’t clear if she understands that the reservoir no longer holds much water. Built for Brooklyn in 1856, Ridgewood Reservoir occupies a large chunk of Highland Park. Since being closed and mostly drained in 1989, it has become a lively habitat for birds, frogs, salamanders, plants, and trees. It has also become the site of an unusual standoff: community residents versus parks.
“Ranger Kate” introduces Jennifer Monson, the choreographer. Jennifer, who has spent much of the last several years on a dance project about the reservoir, has offered to enhance the bird walk with a short series of movement exercises meant to get everyone thinking like a migrating bird. She starts by trying to help us locate ourselves in space.
“Close your eyes,” she says. “Now listen for something very close to you.”
Peering surreptitiously through my eyelashes, I see Bob, who hates the sun, easing himself into the shade of a streetlamp. He’s thin, so this maneuver actually works.
“Now listen for something far away,” Jennifer instructs the group. “What’s the farthest thing you can hear?”
The nearest and the farthest thing I can hear are the same: the radio, now cranked up and blasting CD 101.9. “Smooth jazz for relaxing on the weekend,” a suave male voice intones.
“Now, keeping your eyes closed, turn and face north,” Jennifer says. I peek again. All the birders but one are facing north.
RIDGEWOOD RESERVOIR is a curious new kind of landscape. This is not a park, or a piece of preserved nature, but a previously developed area in the process of reverting to wildness. Urban wildernesses tend to happen by mistake. In a city like New York, where space is at such a premium that former synagogues, sugar factories, and schools have all been reborn as luxury condos, a wilderness can only be the result of inattention.
Ridgewood Reservoir is the recipient of such benign neglect. Originally built to store water from wells and ponds on Long Island for Brooklyn, the three-basin, 100-million-gallon reservoir came under the control of New York City’s Board of Water Supply when the five boroughs united in 1898. It continued to provide Long Island water to Brooklyn throughout the early twentieth century, but development on Long Island was compromising water sources, and fast-growing New York was already looking elsewhere to slake its thirst. The Croton Water System, delivering water from upstate Westchester and Putnam counties, was completed in 1911; the Catskill System was finished in 1927; and the last of the Delaware System’s four massive reservoirs, capable of supplying half the current demand, came online in 1965. The first Catskill water—the “champagne of drinking waters”— came to Brooklyn in 1917, and from then on, as upstate aqueducts and tunnels came into service, Ridgewood Reservoir gradually became obsolete. By 1960, it was demoted to backup, and in 1989, the city decommissioned it and drained two of its three basins. It sat forgotten—by humans anyway—until 2004, when it was signed over to the Department of Parks and Recreation. And that’s when things got interesting.
SOMETIME IN THE EARLY 1990s, Jennifer Monson stumbled upon the reservoir. She lived in the nearby Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick and often biked or walked her dog in Highland Park, using the path that rings the reservoir’s basins. At the time, she was working on Bird Brain Migrations, a multiyear effort she calls a “navigational dance touring project.” In it, Monson and small groups of dancers traveled North America, Cuba, Mexico, and Guatemala, following the migration paths of birds and gray whales. Bringing together community groups, conservationists, and the public, the dancers offered panel discussions, dance workshops, and free, site-specific performances that sought to reconnect communities with their local habitats and the migrating animals that used them. They brought plants indoors and performed dances outdoors, trying to help people see their own locales in a new light.
After Bird Brain, Monson returned to Brooklyn. She felt a desire to focus on a single place. “The traveling was inter-esting, but we were always in the same season,” she says.
“I wanted to be in one place and notice how it changes over the year.”
Then someone took her down into the reservoir she had walked and biked around for years. The moment she stepped into what seemed to be an untamed swamp forest right in the middle of New York City, she was hooked. Her interest only increased when she began to learn about the controversies over the reservoir’s future.
ON THE BIRD HIKE, the group completes Monson’s exercises. The rangers then lead us through the park and up some ramshackle cement steps punctuated by shattered, akimbo street lamps. Designed in the 1890s, Highland Park has stately trees and winding paths, but years of hard use and tight budgets have taken a toll. The stairs lead up a hill at the park’s north side to an asphalt path that rings the reservoir. Bicyclists and joggers are in evidence. As soon as the birders have all arrived, as if on cue, an osprey sails in a wide circle overhead. Fifteen pairs of binoculars veer upward. Slightly lower, a broad-winged hawk crosses the sky.
Immediately, the level of enthusiasm among the birders rises. Field guides are produced, and as the walk proceeds, a group of catbirds is spotted in the bittersweet that overflows the chain-link fence enclosing the reservoir. Two members of the group, however, seem disgruntled: Bob, who’s been told that the park rangers will not allow anyone to go down into the reservoir, and the Queens woman, who has realized that her former swimming hole is now filled with brush, saplings, and trees.
“I can’t believe this,” she keeps saying, in the tone of a Puritan minister arriving on the set of Gossip Girl. It’s understandable. The scrubby trees and undergrowth beyond the fence lack both the grandeur of an established wilderness and the picturesque order of a garden. The young forest looks like what it is: something unattended, gone to seed.
She and Bob both perk up, however, when the rangers partially relent and pull aside a piece of chain-link fence so the group can squeeze through onto the platform of the reservoir’s decrepit pump house. From there, we look south across the middle basin, the only one that still holds water. Its edges are choked with phragmites. In the sky beyond, a 767 lumbers up from John F. Kennedy International Airport. And there, centered on the shallow pond, are two coots and a wood duck, floating serenely in parti-colored glory.
In 2004, when the Parks Department announced plans to make the former reservoir into a park, there was celebration. But three years later, as they launched the design process, something surprising happened. At community meetings, the city’s $46 million plan to upgrade the reservoir with a running track, a cricket pitch, and athletic fields was met with attitudes ranging from lukewarm to hostile.
“We totally reject the idea that the Ridgewood Reservoir should be turned into a conventional park,” Paul Kerzner, president of the Ridgewood Property Owners and Civic Association told the New York Daily News. “Migratory birds have been using the site for at least thirty years. This is their Holiday Inn. Why take it away from them?”
In June 2007, the Department of Parks and Recreation hosted a “community listening session” on the future of the reservoir. Attendees were divided into teams and given templates of the area, along with cardboard cutouts of recreational facilities: baseball diamonds, tennis courts, running tracks, cricket pitches, and more. Each team was to place the facilities they wanted on the reservoir space.
To the surprise of many attendees, the teams showed little interest in the recreational facilities. One team refused to place any. Another suggested a nature center instead. A third team insisted nothing ought to be decided without environmental studies, and a fourth suggested leaving two basins untouched and adding only a skateboard park to the third. The only recreational facility that got any enthusiasm from the final team was an indoor swimming pool. Rob Jett, a birder–attendee with a blog called Save Ridgewood Reservoir, noted that the community seemed to realize something the Parks Department didn’t. “The Department of Parks and Recreation wants to create a world class destination in Ridgewood,” he wrote in his blog; “what they don’t realize is that it already exists.”
In New York City, there have traditionally been two competing schools of thought about parks, each the legacy of a powerful man. There’s the Frederick Law Olmsted legacy, which holds that parks are relief from urban life, landscapes designed to soothe the city-dweller’s spirit and inspire the higher emotions evoked by nature. And there’s the Robert Moses legacy, which sees parks as recreational outlets, places where the poor and middle class can let off steam and engage in wholesome activities like sports and swimming. To Olmsted, the urban dweller required temples to the spirit; to Moses, the masses needed to get off their—couches, let’s say. Neither of these points of view is about ecological value. Neither considers other creatures who might use urban greenery: birds, amphibians, small mammals. And neither attributes value to simply coexisting with an untamed place. Even Olmsted, who saw landscape as spiritually vital, felt that only a certain kind of landscape could perform the work of urban amelioration and social reform: the rolling fields, stately trees, and sweeping prospects of the English pastoral. This carefully defined aesthetic would inspire the moral sentiments and genteel behavior he wanted to instill in the public. His parks reflect this taste beautifully: plop a manor house down at the end of Central Park’s mall and it would look right at home.
At their listening session, the Parks Department was getting push-back on their essentially Moses-school vision for the Ridgewood Reservoir. But that push-back wasn’t coming from the Olmsted school. It was coming from a completely new school, one that saw unmanaged nature itself as a “world class destination.” Less concerned with utility than ecology, this community seemed to value nature just for itself—even, surprisingly, when they were technically barred from it.
A few days after the bird walk, I come back to the reservoir with Jennifer and her dance group. I’m here to see a rehearsal of their performance, and also to trespass. In the parking lot, Jennifer introduces me to the three dancers and the performance’s sound designer, and I follow them up the stairs to the reservoir path. We walk around the fence to a gap on its far side, where we slip through and scramble down the sloped rock wall. The dancers do this with the agility you would expect of dancers. I try to appear equally agile, but eventually, clutching slim tree trunks and sliding down gravelly bits, settle for not killing myself.
At the bottom, the floor of the reservoir is dirt. Stands of skinny birches and aspens intermingle with carpets of moss and thickets of pokeweed and Japanese knotweed. Small maples are dotted about. Much of what grows here is what you would expect to find in the now-vanished Long Island swamp forest that provided the reservoir’s original water: it’s an ecosystem transplanted by infrastructure. There are signs of other trespassers too: broken glass, discarded cans, forts, and paint globs attest
to the basin’s attraction for paintball fans. Homeless people sometimes camp out in the reservoir, Jennifer tells me, but they favor a different basin.
The little group knows exactly where it is going. They always use the same spot, to minimize their impact on the landscape. They weave their way in and out through the trees and brush to a small clearing. Backpacks are dropped, sweatshirts pulled off, and everyone stands in a circle, chatting quietly, a moment that organically grows into the warm-up exercise. Like the birders, the dancers close their eyes, locating themselves in space.
I sink down onto the dry ground under a birch. The leafy, twiggy detritus has a slightly sweet smell. The wind comes up and the skinny birches sway in turn like sports fans doing the wave. A catbird meows. Then a long, high whistle passes by to the north: an Amtrak train gliding through Queens. The dancers move fluidly to their starting spots and begin a slow series of movements, long and dragged out, like changes in the landscape.
THERE IS SOME PRECEDENT for letting old industrial sites or infrastructure return to a wild state. The famous Ruhr district—once the center of German coal and steel production—is now one of the world’s largest postindustrial landscapes. Many of the region’s mines and factories were dismantled by the Allies after World War II; others were demolished in the wake of globalization and the decline of traditional manufacturing in Europe. But in 1996, the Projekt Industriewald Ruhrgebiet (Industrial Forest Project of the Ruhr) began converting some sites into parklands and nature preserves, with natural succession woodlands allowed to slowly disassemble the built environment.
These rewilded woodlands are a new kind of landscape, with new meanings. They suggest to the visitor not an untouched, prehuman world, but a reverted, posthuman one. That creates an interesting tension. Critics point out that there can be a “stigma” attached to such places: they symbolize economic decline as well as natural resilience. These landscapes also counter the ideal of historic preservation, which uses restoration to freeze time. Instead, they yield to decay, drawing the viewer’s attention to time’s relentless arrow.
Critics of the Ruhr project worried that visitors would find the new parks depressing. They haven’t. In fact, visitors seem to take special pleasure in the contrast between the crumbling built world and the vibrant, new natural one. And it isn’t in spite of the landscape’s implications, but because of them. Visitors enjoying nature’s unmaking of human places are following in the footsteps of the Romantics, who swarmed over ancient ruins and gazed up at the Alps, seeking symbols of human frailty and God’s grandeur. It’s a new take on an old idea: the post-technological sublime.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the famous “Grand Tour” of Europe centered on sublime sights, places that combined beauty and terror to inspire awe for something bigger than man. But once humans had mastered the landscape—waterfalls and rivers harnessed for power, distances conquered by the combustion engine, Earth’s very mysteries unraveled down to the genome—we turned to our own achievements in our quest to feel awe. Sublimity was found in the electrical turbine, the jet engine, the slow-motion explosion of a rocket leaving Earth.
As our eyes have adjusted to the brightness of our triumph, we have also discerned its dark underside. Our drive to control and master the environment has begun to frighten us with its success. Today—witness the paintings of Alexis Rockman or writer Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us—we find an odd comfort in the idea of our ultimate failure. All this is not irreversible, says the post-technological sublime. What we have done can be undone.
“I’M ON A MISSION to re-engage people with their environments,” Monson tells me. In 2004, she created a nonprofit corporation called iLand—Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance—with this purpose. In addition to collaborating with educators, field researchers, and architects on place-based projects, iLand worked with the Parks Department to coordinate a full day of events on the path around Ridgewood Reservoir’s rim in June 2007. Six performers danced from dawn until dusk, park rangers provided information about the unique reservoir ecology, displays reported on a local bird
census and vegetation survey, and kids from a local school performed a dance choreographed by Jennifer. Like her current performance, the dance was designed to make people think about place. What shaped this location? What’s shaping it now?
“Dancing is a more direct understanding of how you affect an environment,” Jennifer says. To help the community understand the connections, she had choreographers available to help visitors interpret the performances. The project was considered a success.
Convinced that people would value the reservoir even more if they could see it from the inside, Jennifer tried to get permission from the Parks Department to do public performances in the reservoir basin. She offered to limit the size of audiences and have everyone sign waivers indemnifying the city. Parks said no. Jennifer is disappointed, but not angry. She herself is torn between a desire to help people appreciate the wild space and a protectiveness toward the new woodland just starting to take root there.
“In June we saw all kinds of young immigrant families out enjoying it,” Jennifer says. “They’re often used to having access to nature, and they need it. But then the way the paintball people destroy it, you don’t want to encourage that. Or the kids you see zipping around on their motorbikes. But they look so wild and powerful, and at least they’re outside doing something. It’s very confusing to me. But I love all those dilemmas.”
Dilemmas are likely to remain in a culture that has a hard time expressing the value in just letting things be. The Parks Department is protective toward the place because they see it as acreage: a new cricket pitch! a pool! Jennifer and many in the community value it for its uniqueness and resilience. But how do you quantify that? The birders, perhaps, do it best. On their blogs they keep lists of birds sighted there: chimney swift, cedar waxwing, yellow warbler, ovenbird, indigo bunting, goldfinch. The list may not be dollarable, but at least it’s a list. If this environment is destroyed, it says, something real will be lost.
IN THE MEANTIME, there can be no official performances of Jennifer’s Ridgewood Reservoir piece. But occasionally she and a small group of invited audience members might meet in the parking lot. They might walk together around the south side of the reservoir basins. Imagine them stopping at one point to admire the view across the middle basin’s water, and at another to look east, across Brooklyn. They squeeze through a hole in the chain-link fence and hold trees and each other’s hands as they scrabble down the reservoir wall. They gather around Jennifer as she recounts the reservoir’s history and tells them the names of the plants and trees. They follow each other through the pathless woods, stopping to touch bracket fungi, or run their hands across furry moss patches. They come to a place where the dancers are standing among the trees, looking as if they grew there. The audience members fall silent and settle themselves onto the ground. Radios wired to a central iPod and placed around them in bushes and trees make an ambient noise, almost indistinguishable from the sounds of the woods itself: the stirring of trees, the chirp of insects, squawks of birds, and behind that, the noise of traffic on the Jackie Robinson Parkway and of helicopters grinding through the sky.
When the dance begins, it’s almost as if the wind stirred it up. The dancers’ legs lift slowly in unison, moving like glaciers carving out a valley. Their chests rise and fall, a pulse that seems to relate to the pulse of the place, water rising and falling in the ground, plants drawing on it to grow. They are barefoot. Their feet stir up little puffs of dust. When they move, they move over and under branches, in and out of sight. At one point, one of them steps up into a tree, as deft as a squirrel. Another one lies down on the ground. Sometimes they shake the trees, and sometimes the trees move on their own, as if joining the dancers in the dance.
Finally, they lie on the ground and simply breathe.
Jennifer Monson grew up in the desert. “I grew up with, don’t touch, don’t pick a flower, leave everything as it is,” she tells me. “But as I come to a more dynamic understanding of the back and forth between human action and natural phenomena, I try to be respectful of the place I’m in, but not to feel other from it. To feel part of it.”
Does a community have to use a place in order to feel part of it? Or might they forge new connections through the radical act of leaving something alone? The dancers claim space as they move. They work out a relationship to the place around them, and they inscribe that relationship with movement and action and breath. So, too, the community around Ridgewood Reservoir will, given the chance, work through their connection to a place that’s part of their past, and their future too.
In the meantime, the place goes on with its own life, growing, changing, replacing human handiwork with a new work-in-progress by nature.
Like the Arlington oak, many of the cemetery’s eight thousand trees, dotting 652 acres, stand inseparable from those buried beneath. The giant urban oaks, the oldest the three-hundred-year-old white “Taft oak” by the former president’s grave; the cedar of Lebanon honoring the victims of the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983; and the conspicuous flowering dogwoods, the memorial tree most often requested by families, all serve as dynamic headstones for the dead. Here, human history entangles with the roots of trees.
“We probably have the finest collection of old trees that you’ll find in any urban area, certainly the mid-Atlantic,” says Erik Dihle, division chief for grounds, burial operations, and ceremonial support at Arlington National Cemetery. A horticulturist by trade, he estimates the cemetery boasts about six hundred trees over age one hundred, with a sizeable number over two hundred, too.
The age of the trees is all the more remarkable, Dihle says, given the constant digging at the cemetery and the corresponding risk of damage to tree roots. Arlington is home to twenty-eight to thirty funerals each day.
At Arlington, staff block off locations specifically for trees between and among the hundreds of thousands of headstones. But sometimes tree roots outgrow their allocated spaces—a particularly acute problem when it comes to burying the next of kin in sites that have long been undisturbed. Dihle has seen dramatic cases, like that of the widow of a World War II soldier who died fifty years after her husband. In the intervening period, a lovely black cherry tree had grown up and out near the gravesite, the roots spreading laterally underground. “Well, what do we do? We don’t bat an eye. We dig that grave so she can join her husband,” says Dihle.
But, he adds, “We’re going to do the least damage we can to that cherry tree.”
Stephen Van Hoven, the cemetery’s urban forester, describes the desperate measures unleashed in those rare cases where roots infringe upon space needed for a gravesite: how landscapers prune the sprawling roots with a circular blade they pierce through the soil, blindly dragging it along the tree’s extremities, cutting the roots cleanly so they can regenerate.
He tells how landscapers take an extra step with the most vulnerable of trees—angling an “air spade” and blasting soil away supersonically—then making selective, precise root cuts before the gravedigger starts digging. As long as it’s a clean slice, the tree stands a chance. But when a backhoe snags and yanks at the roots, leaving them ragged, the tree is less likely to ever recover.
There are post-traumatic treatments too. Whenever roots threaten to tango with a backhoe, Van Hoven types a note in his master database. After the funeral procession retreats, the endangered trees receive extra watering, fertilization, or treatment with Cambistat, a chemical that stimulates root growth by rerouting the energy a tree typically devotes to stretching its shoots.
All of this doesn’t come up often. With approximately forty-one hundred burials at Arlington National Cemetery each year, the tension arises just twenty-five times or so. In his just over twenty-five years at the cemetery, Dihle says he can count on one hand the number of times he thought a tree was situated too close to a burial plot. And though a Kentucky coffee tree that, until recently, grew in Section 42 is a notable exception, only rarely, Dihle says, do they lose a tree for a grave.
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