Image Courtesy of Mother . . . → Read More: The Heartland Institute and Being Likened to Charles Manson]]> The Third Ten Million Years is a weekly Precipitate feature exploring the mysteries of life on a single planet, as seen through a single pair of eyes in a single body composed of the same fine material as the deserts of Mars.

Image Courtesy of Mother Nature Network.

In essence, Third Ten Million Years is a project that seeks to understand human behavior in response to what I call reality, or, sometimes, nature. There exists a world in which phenomena occur, and there is the human interpretation of such phenomena. This is my language for asking, How do we understand human behavior? Personally, I think it is best to acknowledge human conduct in its bare sense: we wage war while we write poems; we traffic women and children into slavery while we explore the universe in an attempt to expand human knowledge. Of particular interest here: we are destroying the environment and changing the climate all while seeing the beauty of the natural world.

There is more than one way to respond to the reality of human activity and its impacts on nature. In earnestness, some have acknowledged our impact and are working to lighten our footprint and lessen the danger of climate change. Others think technology and human ingenuity will more than resolve any such problems, if such problems exist at all. Still others know climate change is happening but also know a loving God will not allow humans to destroy the world. I count myself among the first of these options, but I can understand all three. Reality can be terrifying, and we have to live anyway. These options precipitate faith in our ability to change, in human ingenuity, in God. We interpret the real world, and if we do it honestly, it seems at least possible that things might turn out okay.

Many other interpretive tools exist, of course, though not all of them honest. One was displayed this past week in a bizarre story from the Heartland Institute, the anti-science think tank that formerly lobbied for the tobacco industry, disputing evidence that secondhand smoke caused cancer. Heartland Institute has now become the center of the global warming denial industry. Such an organization throws a corkscrew into any attempt to understand human responses to reality. How do we make sense of behavior that denies reality entirely?

In what I can describe only as a stunning decision, the Heartland Institute decided to run billboard ads that equated climate activists with notorious murderers and other “villains.” The notion at the heart of the campaign was that, if Ted Kaczynski and Charles Manson believed in global warming, then other global warming believers are similarly evil. Despite the remarkably poor logic displayed in this line of thought, one must marvel at how this action came to be decided upon. In what world does reality lead to this:

Image Courtesy of Daily Kos.

Naturally, outrage ensued. Politicians rebuked. Bloggers erupted. Heartland Institute pulled the billboards and issued a classic not-apology. This story is perhaps a blip on the radar, a momentary outrage on the internet designed to operate exactly as Heartland Institute meant it: stir some controversy and create incredible publicity for their upcoming anti-science global warming conference. That is what happened. But why are such things happening? In the face of such struggles—and this is nothing new—why do we turn away from reality and embrace a denial of reality?

Frankly, such actions from the Heartland Institute are not surprising. They are shocking, even for them, but not surprising. The Heartland Institute is in the business of ignoring reality. That’s not the primary interest for my column; outrage is well expressed elsewhere. But if this space is about the interactions of human behavior and reality, what do we do with this behavior? Can this be an earnest response to the wealth of scientific support for climate change? That hardly seems possible. Such vilification cannot result from an actual willingness to interpret reality as reality.

Even if one does examine the evidence and determines that climate change is bunk, this kind of response seems hard to understand. I generally default to casting off the anti-science movement as a group interested in slowing the mitigation of climate change for economic gain. After all, the longer it takes to establish a national carbon policy, the more money there is to be made in the wholesale extraction and burning of fossil fuels.

Is that all there is to it? That seems too easy an explanation. I admit that perhaps there is a chance that climate change is not human-induced, that perhaps human carbon emissions are not responsible for an increase in global temperatures. But such a claim is not supported by evidence; it is not supported by reality. So what the hell? Why has my view of the world been equated to Ted Kaczynski’s? How is that possible?

Has the anti-science global warming denial industry left reason so entirely for the deep waters of illogic and irrationality that there is no way to find a connection between evidence and action? How else can such an interpretation of the world be explained? It must be explainable, because if it is not, then we are in even deeper and more terrifying waters than I presumed.

Christopher Zumski Finke, Staff Blogger

Dandelion Seed Head. Photo by Jon Sullivan, courtesy of public-domain-image.com

Dust clings like dandelion snow to cobwebs in places I hadn’t looked in nearly three . . . → Read More: What to Dust, What to Discard: The Quandaries of Packing and Moving Books]]> Dispatches from a Wild Mind is a weekly Precipitate feature that explores the wild in place, nature, history, and art.

Dandelion Seed Head. Photo by Jon Sullivan, courtesy of public-domain-image.com

Dust clings like dandelion snow to cobwebs in places I hadn’t looked in nearly three years: the spaces behind overburdened bookshelves, hardbacks stacked in piles seven and eight high on tops of the bookshelves; in ceiling corners; beneath my childhood bureau, its mahogany finish scratched by the keys I keep there each night. One of these days, I’ll sand and refinish the bureau, varnish the bare-wood bookshelves. These items have moved with me from Pennsylvania to Texas, from there to Nebraska and Iowa. In a week, they’ll return to Nebraska with me in a U-haul.

In the meantime, I’m discovering the extent of what I’ve chosen to ignore: spring cleaning, the cellar spiders living in the out-of-sight recesses and dark corners. This morning, I stood beneath the sprinkler head in the bedroom and for the first time noticed the abandoned strands of cobweb like blond hair strung between it and the overhead light fixture in the center of the room. A soft breeze blew in through the open window. Looking at the gently swaying cobweb reminded me of laundry, the white sheets and T-shirts my mother and grandmother hung on clotheslines my grandfather had strung in the shape of a triangle between three large trees in the backyard. When one of the trees eventually fell, he sank a post in the soil in its place so we’d continue to have outside-dried laundry.

One of these days, I’d love to have my own clotheslines in the backyard. This move won’t allow for that, however, since it’s only temporary. I’m graduating and won’t be returning to Ames, Iowa, after my summer seasonal position as a park ranger in Nebraska ends. Where will I go after that? I can’t say. But it’s why I’m making decisions, dusting what I’m keeping and packing. My stuff–what little I don’t take with me to Agate Fossil Beds National Monument: a box or two of books, my laptop, sufficient clothes for a week or two at best–will end up in Omaha, the city from whence I came to Ames, the city through which I’m passing on my way west.

Cellar spider. Photo by Olaf Leillinger, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

My challenge now is to decide what to keep, what to offer to others, what to discard. I hate waste. Fortunately, I grew up poor and never developed the habit to accumulate; thus, though I hate waste, I’m not a hoarder. Even when I earned $60,000-plus in the years before the housing bubble burst, I refused to acquire more than minimum needed to live comfortably: bed, bureau, futon, a green leather Relax-the-Back chair with an ottoman, a TV and surround sound system, CDs and DVDS, clothes, food, car. My one extravagance? Books.

As I look now at my walls lined by bookshelves, I can’t help but feel like I’ve become one of the farmers Henry David Thoreau referred to in “Walden”: a man who’s a slave to his possessions. What possessions did Thoreau refer to? Cattle, of course. For me, my cattle are books. Since middle school, I’ve collected all sorts: mysteries and thrillers, science fiction and fantasy, literary novels, poetry and short fiction, military histories, and books on anthropology, science, business, and psychology, among other topics. Everywhere I’ve moved I’ve accumulated more and, with them, more bookshelves, where dust and cellar spiders settle in the cobwebs spun between the bookshelves, between the bookshelves and the walls, between the stacked piles of books, between the stacked books and the walls.

Some things I can get rid of: three inexpensive bookshelves, pots and pans, a thirty-year-old globe, two chairs, an electric razor, a dart board, board games, some tools, clothes that no longer fit. These books, though–not many. I suspect I could read two of the ones I already have each week for the rest of my life, live to be at least 80, and still not read all that I have and haven’t yet read. Perhaps I should learn from my cellar spiders. When no longer useful, their webs are abandoned.

For now, I’ve convinced myself I can part with two or three dozen books at most from among the thousand-plus I have (I’ve never counted them). That’s about a box’s worth. The rest I’ll continue to dust and pack. Until summer ends and I know where I’ll be going (hopefully somewhere permanent), the boxes will be stacked on pallets in a storage unit; they’ll outnumber what little furniture I have by at least five or six to one. While they’re there, in the dark, I hope cellar and other spiders move in and stitch together the boxes. Until I can retrieve them, I’ll want the spiders to guard my books from silver fish and other harmful and destructive insects and pests.

Fred MacVaugh, Staff Blogger

Running in Anchorage, Alaska. Photo Courtesy of Daniel Bailey.

If you happen to have read all my posts, you may remember that my first one started out with a rather amusing inquiry . . . → Read More: Fear and Nature]]> Trailing Bartram, a bi-monthly Precipitate blog feature, investigates the flora and fauna of Florida.

Running in Anchorage, Alaska. Photo Courtesy of Daniel Bailey.

If you happen to have read all my posts, you may remember that my first one started out with a rather amusing inquiry from an elderly neighbor about whether I might like to see his peacock. Thinking the worst, my immediate reaction was to hope that my wolf-like dog felt a sudden bout of protectiveness and would lunge after him. Though he turned out to be harmless (if a bit clueless), a recent incident here in Orlando has once again given me pause.

Two cyclists, biking early one weekend morning, ran across two burning things on our local and usually lovely bicycle/multi-use trail. They called 911 and said that there were either mannequins or bodies burning. Well, they turned out to be bodies. Worse, still, they were the bodies of two murdered local teens, ages 16 and 18. Now, there is plenty of speculation as to what those teens might have been doing wrong, possible affiliations with unsavory people. Still, who burns bodies? And leaves them on a bike trail? Wait, back up: Who kills teenagers?

My reaction, in addition to being absolutely horrified for the families and friends of these—let’s be honest—children, is not to want to ride this trail any more. Sometimes I ride with friends, yes, but sometimes I don’t; I enjoy the alone time to go as fast or as slow as I want.

And I enjoy the occasional encounter with a stranger. For example, several weeks ago I had ridden out about 17 miles and had turned back to head home. Surprised (as always) by the headwind, I struggled along, head down, and noticed a raggedy-looking fellow on a sturdy bike ahead of me. I thought I’d just pass him but realized that I was having some trouble keeping up. As usual, my ego got the best of me, and I pedaled and pedaled until I was able to pass him. I made a comment about the wind, and he said something about riding since something a.m.—I thought he said 3, but that couldn’t be right. I said, “Oh, you’ve been riding since 6? Wow!”

“No, three a.m.,” he answered.

A bit shocked, I asked, “What are you training for?”

“Old age,” he said.

Well. I continued to ride with this gentleman—I think he said his name was Jack—who apparently rides some 200 miles a day regularly on weekends. He told me about all kinds of trails near and far, as well as some pointers about riding in the Orlando area. He was a delight to talk with.

I want to be able to ride for hours alone if I choose, like Jack. I want to be able to meet folks like him on shared trails and have a good conversation, then part ways somewhere down the road and say, honestly, “I hope to see you again one day soon.”

But incidents like this recent double murder on the trail–and like the one or two times back in Lansing, when older and perhaps mentally unwell men made inappropriate gestures and worse to me on a river trail not always populated with lots of cyclists or runners–make me just unwilling to go ride when I want to.

There’s a fine line between common sense caution and irrational, life-limiting fear, but I can’t figure out where that line is. There’s the obvious: ride during the day, carry a phone, and then the not-so-obvious: is it OK to ever ride alone? Is it stupid? Is it simply asking for trouble? I certainly hope not.

Despite the fact that I am quite certain I could out-run, out-cycle (well, one day), and even do some physical damage to most people encountered in my daily rides, I don’t know what kind of anger or what kind of weapons people might have, especially in a state that is quite proud of its liberal gun ownership and gun use laws, and is simultaneously one of the worst-hit states of the economic downturn.

I also think about a free class at a college where I used to teach. Many places offer these classes, and I am pretty sure everyone should go to one, or five. It was a women’s self-defense class, and what I got from it was not as much technique (though they spent plenty of time on technique–how to inflict painful blows in self-defense when you really have to). The real takeaway for me was permission. Sure, you don’t ever really want to hurt someone. As not only a woman but also as a peace activist, I really, really don’t want to hurt anyone. But, as I learned from this class, when someone is after you, when violence is happening to you, sometimes you must do everything you can to get away. Now, I am as interested as the next person in determining the root cause of a society where violence, particularly violence against women, even rape culture, is considered OK, but (God forbid) being in the midst of an attack is not the time to necessarily have that discussion. It’s also not the time to give in, and, as I’ve heard too many women say, think that somehow you deserved it.

As a relatively athletic and sturdy person, I’m actually pretty strong, but at this class, repeatedly, all of us had to be told to hit harder (the instructors were police officers wearing lots of padding). An acquaintance from my department finally let go, in an end-of-class test where we were to go all out. She had known a faculty member, who, years ago had been raped and then killed in the college’s parking deck. She had brought her adult daughter to this class with her. And she was mad. I can’t help but think that permission to be angry, and to know that we can hit back was good for her and for all of us in the class. I admired one of the police officers’ two daughters, who, at about 9 years old, was clearly not afraid to scream, shout, and do damage if she ever felt she needed to.

In Florida, it’s easy to remember nature red in tooth and claw—the kind of non-human nature that we are instantly afraid of, from gators to birds of prey to poisonous snakes, not to mention weather, but experiencing urban nature in Florida also reminds us that the same solitude and wildness that attracts outdoors adventurers also can attract very ugly people doing very ugly things. Negotiating the fine line between safety and solitude, nature and lawlessness, is not a task to be taken lightly—nor should it prevent us from being outside.

Leslie Wolcott, Staff Blogger

Courtesy of Hodder and Stoughton Publishing

“Hey babe. Whatcha doin’?”

“Precipitate . . . → Read More: Misery]]> Where Dead is Better: The Ongoing Saga of a Little Girl’s Love Affair with Stephen King is a monthly column that explores the artistic and imaginative influence of King’s wild places upon one impressionable child.

Courtesy of Hodder and Stoughton Publishing

“Hey babe. Whatcha doin’?”

“Precipitate post. I think I’ll talk about ‘Misery.’”

“Is that the one where Kathy Bates gets naked?”

“You’re thinking of your bachelor party. No, ‘Misery’ is the one where Kathy Bates finds an injured writer who wrecked his car in a snow storm in Colorado, takes him back to her place, hooks him up with codeine, and spends a few weeks cutting off his more useful body parts. Then he sets some shit on fire and brains her with a typewriter.”

“I like it.”

“That’s just the movie, though. The book has much more nuance.”

“By ‘nuance,’ I assume you mean cussing.”

“Correct.”

“So, what’s your angle?”

“Snow! The malignant transformative powers of snow!”

“How topical. You know it’s April now, right?”

“Oh hush, you’re going to love it. See, whereas you and I grew up in places where luck of the latitudinal draw precluded any appreciable accumulation of–”

“Don’t use vocabulary words. That’s cheating.”

“Growing up, we didn’t have snow. Not real snow, I mean. We had cold and flurries and hail from time to time.”

“I had fog.”

“Yes, and you had hurricanes and I had flash floods, but no blizzards, no winter wonderlands, no poor weather guy warning us to watch out, we might get four inches tonight.”

“Ha!”

“So, for us, snow was something we read about, something fantastic and exotic. It’s isolating, it’s obfuscating, it’s beautiful and dangerous. And it’s transformative in a peculiar way other weather isn’t.”

“I’m listening.”

“Snow changes a place texturally and visually. A place soaked with rain is the same place, only wet; it feels different to the touch, but it mostly looks the same, sounds the same. A place obscured by fog is the same place, only hazy; it looks different, but brush your hand against something and it feels the same, lick a doorknob and it tastes the same. But a place buried by snow–really buried–it looks different and it feels different. Not one or two but all of the directional markers are changed or absent. Every sense by which we identify is confounded! It is, for us, a different place entirely.”

“Who licks a doorknob? Somebody dared you, didn’t they?”

“See, in ‘Misery,’ snow is the border between two very different places, each realizing possibilities excluded by the other. When it’s blizzardy snowland outside and nobody’s leaving their houses, you can keep a guy locked up in your guestroom and feed him pills and mop-water to your heart’s content. But once the snow’s gone, and people start going out again, and also start coming to your house again, then that’s no longer the case. Snow-bound Colorado and thawed Colorado, identical penal codes notwithstanding, seem to have quite dissimilar attitudes towards kidnapping–if you’re going to do it, make sure you know which one you’re in.”

“I love how that’s the lesson you learned from ‘Misery’: winter’s the best time to kidnap. If you’re going to kidnap someone, do it when it’s snowing and the cops don’t feel like driving, because this will allow you more time for drugs and amputations. Even as a child, you were able to see past the gore and identify the really important stuff, the wisdom that you could draw on in times of need. I am, quite honestly, impressed.”

“Oh yeah? Wait till I show you the lesson I learned from ‘Firestarter.’”

Martha Stallman, Staff Blogger

Katniss hunts in the . . . → Read More: The Hunger Games’ Unintentional Celebration of Wild Spaces]]> The Third Ten Million Years is a weekly Precipitate feature exploring the mysteries of life on a single planet, as seen through a single pair of eyes in a single body composed of the same fine material as the deserts of Mars.

Katniss hunts in the woods beyond the borders. Courtesy of Lionsgate Entertainment.

I planned for this post to return to a discussion of climate science. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve specifically discussed climate change, and there have been some interesting studies coming out as of late. In addition to this relevant research, there have been some fascinating maps providing a visualization of our energy system and greenhouse gas emissions. It would have been an interesting post.

Instead, I’m going to talk about The Hunger Games. I finished the trilogy this past week, and the series was okay. This isn’t going to be a book review, though; I’m not interested in peddling on behalf of Suzanne Collins. Rather, there is an idea that runs through the background of The Hunger Games and that ties into my previous post about returning to the rough edges of American Romanticism, an idea that I think provides a rich context to the project of Third Ten Million Years.

What interested me in Collins’s dystopic future America is that, to a lover of both the actual wilderness and the idea of wild spaces, there was something attractive about Panem—the post-apocalyptic America in which the series is set. Most of the North American continent appears to have returned to wild control, with seemingly the entire West off the grid. Outside the districts is land untamed, and time in those spaces is freedom from the tyrannical day-to-day life of the characters, none of which is unusual in American literature. But this is classic American Romanticism, where borders are crossed and nature unhinged is encountered. The woods in The Hunger Games differ from the woods in a lot of recent fiction. In HG, wild spaces inherently hold potential danger; such danger comes from the tyrannical plot points, but also from the unknown woods themselves. That’s something that easily gets lost in most contemporary representations of nature.

Of course any appeal The Hunger Games has in its treatments of the wild does not extend to the dictatorial fascist government and the murdering (and murdering and murdering) of children that’s ever-present in the series. The through-line plot in the books is one of the least interesting elements. But there is a richness in the series–something I’ve noticed in other young adult series of late–which relies on a strong mixture of the attraction and danger of wild spaces.

Last week I mentioned how the notion of writing and talking about American wilderness has become a “pseudo-inspirational enterprise.” This is not to be inherently criticized, but it seems that we are at best providing an over-simplified reduction of what the wild is really like. Such simplification is part of our national identity. When we Europeans showed up on the new continent, the woods were terrifying. William Bradford found a “hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” Though this interpretation may seem extreme, it is not hard to understand, for, quite literally, going into the woods could mean death from any number of unknown causes. The fear of the untamed wild brought us “Young Goodman Brown” and a host of other stories meant to remind us of the danger of the woods.

Such an impulse was understood and countered by the romantic Americans of the 19th century. Today, I think we have gone too far in the opposite direction. I celebrate our National Park System as among the greatest assets the American government has given its citizens, but I worry that Ken Burns has transformed the parks from the opportunity to encounter the face of nature into an immovable photo collage of the past. Perhaps this is unfair, but the world is changing and our perceptions of wild spaces are, too. If Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately, today we go to the woods to see nature served to us on a platter. How else to explain developing a “luxurious wilderness destination” resort on an untouched island that will facilitate “extreme wildlife encounters?” For the record, I’m no different; I would to visit that resort. I’m sure it would be a breathtaking experience.

Wild spaces should inspire us, but they should also make us at least a little afraid. Humans are visitors to the wild spaces, and we are meant to be cautious. I glimpsed that caution and excitement in The Hunger Games trilogy. This may seem a lot to read from a tertiary, perhaps inconsequential or accidental element of a young adult post-apocalyptic pop-fantasy series, but the great thing about novels is that they say what they say regardless of the author. In a series about terror and fascism and propaganda, there still remains the undercurrent of that most American trait: the danger and sacredness of the woods outside our borders.

Christopher Zumski Finke, Staff Blogger

A White-breasted Nuthatch. Photo Courtesy of WikiCommons

No. I’m not leaving Precipitate. Today is my last day at Iowa State University, the last day before I . . . → Read More: So Long, Farewell: The Final Wander through the Woods]]> Dispatches from a Wild Mind is a weekly Precipitate feature that explores the wild in place, nature, history, and art.

A White-breasted Nuthatch. Photo Courtesy of WikiCommons

No. I’m not leaving Precipitate. Today is my last day at Iowa State University, the last day before I move that I’ll walk the two or three miles home from campus. I will miss this walk, the well-worn foot-printed path through the leafing trees and flowering weeds along the meandering creek, the rickety lumber bridge I cross, the water’s trickle. Sun sparks like flashbulbs off the current’s soothing ripples.

Last week, walking home, I paused on the small arching bridge and leaned my hips against its two-by-four railings. A woman in a summer dress walked barefoot in my direction down the center of the creek. Water swirled around her calves as she held her dress up above the passing current. Her boyfriend or a classmate stood in the water nearby and snapped photographs. Elsewhere in the park, children climbed a jungle gym and slid down its slide, and a couple tossed a green tennis ball for their small dog that could have been a Jack Russell Terrier. In the distance, a half-dozen high school or college kids played soccer on a recently mowed field.

When I wrote last month about an English Department proposal to create a Ph.D. program with an environmental concentration and literature core, the post ended with me advocating for a Ph.D. that taught candidates to be “active, well-informed, and thoughtful walkers.” Can you name an environmental thinker in the last two centuries who hasn’t been a walker actively pursuing full bodily–that is, full sensory–immersion in the outdoors? Of course, I think of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, the American nature writers and wilderness icons Christopher Zumski Finke wrote so eloquently about in “Fleeing to the Woods, or, Giving Thoreau His Bite Back.”

Like Chris, I agree people have romanticized and subsequently simplified and misunderstood Thoreau and Muir, have as a consequence oversimplified and tamed nature and wilderness, those Others that exist for most people today as little more than backdrop and setting. Don’t believe me? Survey American fiction and children’s literature, as I wrote about recently: Nature’s rapidly disappearing as anything more significant than setting.

What I’ll miss about my walks home from work is the reminders of nature, small and however tame and romantic they may be in a suburban park and forest: the explosive arrival of green grasses and trees’ leaves, wild purple-petaled violets that resemble butterflies, wings spread; white-faced, black-crowned nuthatches bounding up and down tree trunks; the distant rhythmic beat of a woodpecker. This immersion, no matter how brief, relaxes me, soothes tired mind and muscles.

According to new research from the University of Kansas, people who spend time outdoors show “startling cognitive improvement–for instance, a 50 percent boost in creativity–after living a few days steeped in nature.” Ruth Ann Atchley, a psychologist, says nature offers one a very real and tangible escape and respite from the information assault and overload such as Chris described in “Fleeing to the Woods”: the endless accounts of people’s violence against people.

In another few weeks, when I get to Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, I’ll test Atchley and her colleagues’s conclusions that time “steeped in nature” boosts creativity. Maybe I’ll write more; we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, I’ll miss these frequent walks home along the creek and the momentary escape from thinking they offered.

A day or two before seeing the woman and her boyfriend wading in the water, I paused on the trail beside an S-shaped bend in the creek. The water flowed clear, revealing each washboard-like dune of settled silt as if I peered through glass. As I watched, my vision focused only on the creek. My sense of surroundings faded. I saw only water, the fallen limbs it passed over and around. I listened. My ears opened, became more attuned to its trickle and flow, its ripple as steady as small pebbles like jacks, the metal game pieces, tossed across a wooden floor. But instead of stopping like pebbles or jacks, the sound continued. In its continuance, tension ebbed from mind and muscles. For a moment or two, I’d stopped thinking and reacting. I simply sensed and felt. I inhaled deeply and sighed. When I resumed my stroll home, I felt happier, at peace, thankful for the opportunity to walk, thankful for the beauty of a clear running creek and cardinals, their joyful calls reassuring, hopeful, and lovely.

Fred MacVaugh, Staff Blogger

Henry David Thoreau, frozen . . . → Read More: Fleeing to the Woods, or, Giving Thoreau His Bite Back]]> The Third Ten Million Years is a weekly Precipitate feature exploring the mysteries of life on a single planet, as seen through a single pair of eyes in a single body composed of the same fine material as the deserts of Mars.

Henry David Thoreau, frozen and harmless, in front of a replica of his Walden Cabin. Courtesy of WikiCommons

While sipping my coffee before work the other day, I heard the hourly public radio news roundup, which was comprised of the following stories: George Zimmerman’s lawyers want him released until his trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin, Anders Breivik gave a detailed and unrepentant description of massacring children to an Oslo courtroom, two U.S. Marines are being dismissed for lying to investigators about a massacre of 24 civilians in Iraq, and the Syrian government is ignoring a UN brokered ceasefire and continuing its shelling of Homs. That was it. That was the entirety of the news update provided by NPR. Minnesota Public Radio then came on with a local news update, but I was so dazed by the horror of reality, I switched to The Current.

Overwhelmed by the seemingly endless desire humans have for killing each other, this news roundup created a strong impulse in me to flee the city for the woods. Such an impulse is healthy and natural—and for myself it certainly is not unusual. I suffer from it regularly, never more than in springtime. A work week makes this difficult, though, so I settled for thinking about what it means to desire the woods. When one talks about the craving for wilderness, it often gets attached to two different ways of thinking: escapism and Romanticism. Both, in my opinion, are wonderful endeavors, and useful in the light of constant human violence. But I think the longing for nature is different than both.

The desire to flee civilization for the woods isn’t about escapism in the entertainment sense of the word. I do not think an escapist tendency should be rejected—I think we all at times need escape. It’s just something different. We escape to altered worlds to reflect on and learn something about how we live, or to just have the chance to ignore our world altogether. Escapism offers an opportunity to derail the senses, to take a break from our world to experience another, while never really getting free of reality. This is why I read “Lord of the Rings” every 18 months or so.

“Lord of the Rings” is escapism of the first order; it is the perfect environment in which to embrace the warm comfort of fiction. This is not like a trip outside. Fleeing to the woods, rather, is an effort to overindulge in reality, to return to our first and most fundamental reality. I recognize that might sound a bit Thoreauvian, a “get back to the woods” style Americana that feels inspirational but contains little actual meaning, like a self-help book or episode of Dr. Phil that sounds true but actually says nothing. This overs-simplified rendering of “getting outside” leads to the second simplified attachment to the desire for the woods, Romanticism–or at least the altered version of Romanticism that it has become.

The rich romantic history of American Transcendentalism cannot be duly represented in this blog post. Suffice it to say that the 19th century American Transcendentalists shaped the consciousness of the nation we have become, and opened a window to nature that previously did not exist. Emerson and Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and Walt Whitman: they and others helped push an identity of simultaneous individualism and interconnectedness, a feat that deserves no small amount of recognition. American nature is imbued with romanticism because of the work from this period. But I fear too often we look back at the romantic writers of our national past and see them in softness and un-seriousness. At least, when I am feeling lazy, I do. I contrast them to, rather than see them as akin to, the darker worlds of Melville or Hawthorne—-trying to make sense of the dark and the light of the world.

Today, I think we have a cast a pedestrian pall over Thoreau’s texts and ideas. Generations of college students have scribbled in the margins of “Walden,” myself included. I read that his sojourn to the woods was “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” I underlined it and quoted it but ignored what it said. This might be the most recognizable sentence in Walden, and it has become a sentiment attached to American idealism and love of nature: get back to the woods and find yourself. It is the same notion that has made Thoreau the statue by the cabin, neutralized. I wonder if we have stripped Thoreau and his deliberateness from its context, which is squarely in the same world that produces the horror in our news.

Thoreau recognized the horrors around him, and his time at Walden Pond was not escapist. He looked at life like a scientists looks in the microscope: to see the world clearly. And I think he did. Thoreau knew the manner in which Americans survive: “we live meanly, like ants.” It is not a condemnation but an honest admission that the world is a difficult place, and this difficulty exists in civilization and in the wild.

I fear today’s meaning of the word romantic, as opposed to what it meant to the brilliant American minds that produced it, has become bullshit. We have made the work of real investigation into a rose-colored pseudo-inspirational enterprise. It is a clichéd notion of selfishness, of getting back to ourselves, getting out of the city, restoring ourselves in the wild, going West, preserving the wilderness for the restoration of our souls; it is the belief that nature is pure and humans are not because we do not live in the wild. That’s a beautiful sentiment but ultimately needs to be rejected. I arrived at this misconception through the American Transcendentalists, but stuck with them long enough to realize this was only a surface reading. The woods are a dangerous place. A walk in the woods is not a pleasant stroll in the garden. Entering the wild means returning to our roots, literally. It is the place that spawned the species that made the men who continually murder their brothers.

When Thoreau built his cabin or John Muir strapped himself to the top of a redwood in a storm, they were not embodying the trite notion of American Romanticism–that came later as we sought to demystify nature and strip it of its bite. We may have turned Muir and Thoreau into symbols that we can easily disregard as meaningless, but they endeavored to encounter the real world, which is more than, but never separate from, our human violence.

When the news comes of the next horrible tragedy, and the unrelenting campaign ensues to make me aware of every gory detail, I again will long for the American wilderness. Not to escape from reality, and not paint reality in the pastels of harmlesness as I sometimes do. Rather, I will go to find nature, red in tooth and claw, in the real endeavor of our 19th century forebears: “be it life or death, we crave only reality.”

Christopher Zumski Finke, Staff Blogger

The Temples and the Towers of the Virgin in Zion National Park. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.

Has spring’s arrival got you feeling anxious . . . → Read More: Celebrate National Park Week: Hike, Observe the Stars, and Make Crafts at a Park near You]]> Dispatches from a Wild Mind is a weekly Precipitate feature that explores the wild in place, nature, history, and art.

The Temples and the Towers of the Virgin in Zion National Park. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.

Has spring’s arrival got you feeling anxious to get outside and out of town? Not sure what to do or where to go with family, friends, or by yourself? I’ve got a thought. How about visiting the national park nearest you? There are 397 national park sites to choose from. And this week, April 21–29, is National Park Week. That means admission to all 397 of them is free (entrance fees are waived), even at Arches and Zion National Parks in Utah. (You can check out the full list of parks with waived entrances fees here.)

Why go now, in April? Because 280 million people visit national parks annually and the bulk of visitation occurs in the summer months. Go now, and you’ll not only save entrance fees but also avoid the summer crowds.

Before you pack up the car, check out the National Park Service’s National Park Week event calendar. You can search by park and date. Here’s just one of a plethora of examples: On Friday, 4/27, Agate Fossil Beds and Scotts Bluff National Monuments in western Nebraska are, in partnership with the Midwest Theater and Panhandle Astronomy Club, hosting a free night sky program in Scottsbluff. The evening begins at 7:30 p.m. with “The City Dark,” a film about the effects of light pollution and what the disappearance of darkness might mean; afterward, visitors carpool in vans to the summit of Scotts Bluff to observe stars, planets, and the effects of light pollution on the area once crossed by hundreds of thousands of west-bound Oregon Trail emigrants.

Can’t make it to western Nebraska? Don’t worry. Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan has its own April star party on Friday as well.

Have kids? Perhaps you’ll want to wait until Saturday, April 28: National Junior Ranger Day. Parks around the country have events planned for this special day to celebrate the NPS’s year-round program for children. In “Don’t Bust the Crust!”, Arches National Park rangers will teach kids about the desert’s living soil and how to protect it. At Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas, meanwhile, rangers have planned games for children, including sack races, jumping rope, Baggo, flying hoops, and more. For children in San Francisco more interested in arts activities, especially maritime crafts, don’t miss out on the crafts for kids at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.

Kids on the beach at San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park in California. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.

Wherever you go, if you go, have a blast, and remember this: national parks really are America’s Best Idea, a gift given to us and the world.

Fred MacVaugh, Staff Blogger

Image Courtesy of NBC

Over the past week or so, my neighbor has stepped up his crazy game. No longer content to knock on my . . . → Read More: Home is Behind the Deadbolt]]> Mighty Neighborly, a regular feature on the Precipitate blog, explores how everyday, local decisions impact a larger community and the environment.

Image Courtesy of NBC

Over the past week or so, my neighbor has stepped up his crazy game. No longer content to knock on my door repeatedly à la Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory, or to wait for me to leave or enter my apartment so he can suddenly spring upon me (that was his way of obeying the cops who said to stop bothering me), he’s taken to leaving his door open. All day. For a week.

I’ve tried negotiations. I’ve tried sanctions. Now it’s a cold war. He stands outside of my door, rattling plastic bags and clearing his throat for hours at a time. I talk loudly on the phone about potential calls I might make to the building manager or to the police, as though they might actually do something this time. He might have me beat in crazy, but having lived with six other women at once, I have a powerful skill at passive aggression.

I was about to write that there would be a problem if this little war began to escalate, but that’s only partly true. It’s a problem now. I don’t feel secure in my own home. Since this neighbor saga began, my inability to recharge has kept me on edge, sapping my working memory and my patience. My temper is erratic by nature; I could do without the help. So it is with much sadness that I announce that I will be leaving my current apartment.

And it is with much joy that I announce I’m going to attempt to buy a house and take a roommate. The roommate’s a given. A friend of mine and I have already agreed that we could save a lot of money, if just on the calls we make to each other several times a week. The part that’s more difficult is the house buying. I’m in talks with a broker and a realtor and hope to buy a two-bedroom place by the end of June.

I haven’t lived with anyone for more than a few months in the past four years, so it’s a little intense to think that someone else will know that I sometimes secretly watch Hot in Cleveland, or will listen to me practice guitar while I’m still learning. But I also like knowing that I picked this person, that she will love keeping the dog I plan to get for company, and that we can share a CSA box. She’s also on board to call 911 if I don’t return from dates.

I’m not sure why this seems less invasive than someone staring into my peephole. After all, my new roommate will not only hear me being weird, she’ll see it and smell it, too. It’s choice, for one thing, and it’s also time. At my birthday about a week ago, the first two friends to show up were people I had known for over fifteen years apiece. If past behavior is any indicator of future performance, it’s likely we will stay friends for another fifteen.

Perhaps it’s not the pushing of intimacy from a stranger that scares me so much as transience. When I see his sad, hollow eyes staring at me from across the hall, I wonder if that’s where I will be when I’m his age: alone, terrifying and terrified.

H. V. Cramond, Staff Blogger

Corn Field. Courtesy of Kansas Corn Growers Association

The minute hand on the clock moved from thirty-nine to forty. For the first time in recent memory, I found myself riveted, saddened a class period would soon end. I wanted the minutes to stretch out for as . . . → Read More: The Power of an Agronomist’s Language]]>

Corn Field. Courtesy of Kansas Corn Growers Association

The minute hand on the clock moved from thirty-nine to forty. For the first time in recent memory, I found myself riveted, saddened a class period would soon end. I wanted the minutes to stretch out for as long as possible.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve enjoyed graduate classes. But I’d nearly forgotten the feeling I had in high school or as an undergraduate, when I took a class with a fascinating topic and an enthusiastic teacher. That feeling of not wanting to leave, of wishing for a little longer to discuss Sandra Cisneros’s “The House on Mango Street” or Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” It’s a feeling I’d forgotten until last week when I attended a lecture by a former agronomy professor now working as a Senior Scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The speaker was a tall man, probably in his early fifties, and amiable, the kind of person you’d like to get coffee with so you could pick his brain. He seemed the kind of person who would be genuinely interested in your opinions. He opened his talk with graphs and statistics about the rising population, the depletion of natural resources, the increase in diet-related health issues, the correlation between greater income inequality and an increase in social problems. He charted the world’s countries, pinning the United States as one of the outliers—in the least desirable spot—in that last category. He said he did this to highlight the difficulties my generation faces, the problems we already know about.

Then he backtracked. He told his story. He grew up in Mexico, the son of a Native American father and German-American missionary mother. He knows multiple cultures and languages, being educated abroad and then in the United States. The story moved from family farms in Mexico to agricultural studies in New Mexico to corn in Iowa. He told of the opportunities he encountered, the choices he made that at the time didn’t seem like choices; some of them just things that fell into his lap. When he reached the end of his own story, he paused, pressed the tips of his fingers together, and looked out at his audience.

The reason he told us this, he said, was to show how he got where he is, and the important role his history and perspective played in helping him comprehend the problems of his time and make choices to help solve those problems. He said because he grew up comfortable in many places and with people of many backgrounds, he came to understand the way that many of the problems we face are not the problems of one city, one region, or one country. They are not the problems of one place, but rather the problems of the whole planet. When the population reaches 9 billion around 2050, as some scientists predict, the problems we will face will be global in scale. We will have to work together. The agronomist gestured to his PowerPoint slides and referenced his earlier material, the trends he opened his presentation with. These things, he said, are the global problems you face.

Perhaps I should have mentioned earlier: I am a writer. I’ve always been fascinated by science, but chose to study the subject I loved instinctually: language. I studied literature and writing and then added a major in Spanish. I loved the way words could travel from one language to another, their sounds shifting, their meanings often changing, too. Language was like a puzzle, and the words held secrets.

But as the agronomist answered the audience’s questions, I wondered if I hadn’t made a mistake. I wondered if I should have chosen something else, a different path, a different discipline. I agreed whole-heartedly with what the man told us about the importance of understanding other places and cultures. But what if I had no useful knowledge base to share, to apply to the growing problems our planet faces? Had I made the wrong choice, approached the problem from the wrong angle?

The last question I heard during the Q&A session was from the student sitting on my left. He asked whether it was more important to focus on local change–producing food locally, helping create better social systems in our communities–or to try to create large-scale policy change. Yes, I thought. That’s a good question. To paraphrase one of those philosophers who had likely riveted that eighteen-year-old college freshman in an introductory philosophy course, How should we live? But I didn’t get to hear the agronomist’s response because the minute hand ticked toward 4:50, and the friend sitting in the chair on my right grabbed my arm and raised her eyebrows, indicating we needed to hurry or we’d miss the bus.

Outside, the agronomist’s facts, statistics, and story of Zapotec descendants bounced around in my brain. Maybe I should have made different choices, but maybe that line of thinking was futile. Maybe I had to do the best I could with the knowledge I had. One of the reason’s the agronomist’s lecture was so engaging was because he was an amazing speaker. He spoke the language of science, but also the language of his lay audience. He knew how to reach us. My language, too, is the language of words, of trying to use them to understand places and the people who live in them. What I think we can all do is keep learning, keep attending lectures–literally or metaphorically–that keep us on the edge of our seats. Then we can do what we can with the tools we have. I don’t know how the agronomist answered the last question about how we should live, but I like to imagine that’s what he said.

Katie Sukalich grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the edge of Lake Michigan. Consequently, she feels slightly disoriented when there isn’t water nearby. She has worked as a composition instructor in Iowa and taught English in Mexico, among other things. She will receive her MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University this May.