Walk with me. I know, we’ve done this loop in the State Park at my doorstep many times before. Yet every year I feel compelled to post the photographs of a yellow/orange-dotted world that appears early November, signaling transition, like yellow lights are wont to do.
There is something so utterly optimistic about yellow or orange dots swarming tree trunks, or yellow leaves providing contrast for the increasingly milky brook, or migrating birds – thrushes to be precise – fitting into the color scheme. A last Hurrah before darkness settles in.
There is something tangibly sensuous about the moist surfaces,
and something mysterious about the lamellae and gills.
A recently launched organization called SPUN (Society for the Protection of Underground Networks) is devoted to study and protect fungi to safeguard biodiversity and curb climate change. They have a pretty slick website and ambitious plans to map mycorrhizal fungi, tiny organisms that intertwine with roots of certain tress and nearly all the other plants in specific forests. You can see videos of their field trips in South America and Europe and learn about the scientists involved – they call themselves Myconauts, a clever contraction of the mushroom subject and the associated explorative adventures. For a shorter, quite educational summary essay I went here – much to learn.
No need to return to Chile, though, as much as I’d be tempted – the visual harvest in forests closer to home is just as beautiful.
Independently, since I was reading about fungi, I chanced on new research that shows fungal DNA in various human tumors. We have no clue if there is a causal connection – if fungi, in other words, could be responsible for certain cancers – we just know there is a link.
A small number of fungal cells have been found in 35 different cancer types, with fungal species composition differing among them. What are they doing there? How did they get there? Are they participating in pathology, or are they just taking advantage of immune system suppression in cancerous tissues? Or maybe there are immune cells that ate fungi and carried sequences to a tumor site?
If we knew what their role is we could use them in diagnostic procedures as markers for pathological growth. Or, more excitingly, if we knew how they got into the tumors we could theoretically have cancer-fighting drugs hitchhike on those cells and deliver the chemo specifically on site, a breakthrough in therapeutics.
Enough, let’s not spoil a perfectly glorious fall walk with thoughts of disease or environmental destruction. Let’s enjoy the ruffled beauty,
and the occasional daily wild life in search of a tasty morsel.
And for sound today there is some use of bio data sonification to help a listen to some oyster mushrooms. Changes in electrical resistance are converted into control signals for a eurorack modular synthesizer. The guy who records all kinds of fungi, electronic musician Noah Kalos, a.k.a. MycoLyco, is based in North Carolina. His goal: “just being able to find a signal that we can really observe helps to raise awareness that fungi are all living, we’re all part of the same thing.”
Alternatively, we can just listen to Massenet’s classical capture of thoughts in fall.
Feeling like the weight of time rests on your shoulders, buckling your knees in these unsettling days after we had to reset our clocks?
Antonio de Pereda Still life with clock (1652)
You’re not alone. The switch in time that happens twice annually is a generally unsettling experience, and, as it turns out, a generally unhealthy one as well.
Last week’s media were full of articles on the topic, with everybody and their uncle writing about the consequences of Daylight Saving Times, it seems. I thought I’ll add some additional value: art about clocks which, across centuries, reminded us of some basic truths: time is limited, the moment precious. Clocks rule us (even when they show a time that we know is not the correct one) and can be tyrannical in the workplace or at school, when our bodies are not keeping up with the demand. Artists have used clocks as symbols for synchronicity, or morphed them in surreal ways to help us question the reality of time. They have been displayed as symbols of luxury for those who have more free time than others, or as reminders that it is time to wake up and grab the day. Which brings me back to the alternation between Daylight Savings time and Standard time.
Pieter Claesz Vanitas (1625)
Our bodies contain numerous clocks – there is basically a timekeeper in each of our organs, and all of them are kept in perfect synchrony by the brain, that keeps score of the time with the first rays of light each day triggering the cycle. If you change the onset or disappearance of light by an hour, suddenly, the synchronicity between brain and the rest of the organs disappear, and everyone is playing catch up. (Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine with their work on Circadian Rhythms that demonstrated the existence of these plethora of clocks.)
Marc Chagall Homage to Apollinaire (1912)
The consequences? An increase in heart problems, from fibrillation to infarction, particularly when Daylight Saving time arrives in spring. It is harder to fall asleep, during the brighter evenings, and harder to get up in the early mornings. Since the beginning of school, work or other commitments has not changed, “social jet lag” occurs, a mismatch between our internal clock and the external world that almost always leads to sleep deprivation. The health consequences of chronic sleep deprivation are well described: increased risk of mood disturbance, cardiovascular disease and metabolic dysregulation. (Ref.)
Paul Cezanne The Black Marble Clock (1869)
Statistics do not just show an increased hospitalization for heart and vascular disease issues directly after the time switch. We also see an increased number of car accidents and accidents in the workplace for the days following. That might have to do with driving during darker conditions, or being generally groggy and thus less able to pay attention, but the numbers do go up, in fact 6% for fatal crashes alone.
Who suffers the most from a mandated switch? Young people, it turns out.
“Because of the later biological pacing of the teenage brain, waking at 7 a.m. already feels to young people like waking at 5 a.m. With permanent daylight saving time, it would feel like 4 a.m. This would put a serious strain on teen mental health. The result would be, among other things, shortened sleep for a population that is already severely sleep-deprived and a potential uptick in rates of depression, when teens are already struggling with elevated levels of depressive symptoms and suicidal thinking.”(Ref.)
Raqs Media Collective Escapement (2009)
So, in its infinite wisdom, the government decided to do away with the back and forth between Standard time and Daylights Saving time. The Senate unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act of 2021, which would establish a fixed, year-round time. If passed by the House and signed by the president, our clocks would stay in the “spring forward” mode in November 2023, leading to permanent daylight saving time across the nation (except in a handful of states and territories that observe permanent standard time). Of course it picked, on the suggestion of Marco Rubio and Kyrsten Sinema, Daylight Saving Time that all of science says is much more unhealthy for us than Standard Time.
José Gurvich Still life with clock (1959)
This is particularly true for the westernmost areas of a given time zone. We already have later sunsets compared with the easternmost areas; during daylight saving time, West Coast citizens would experience a greater mismatch between their circadian clock and the external environment and an increased risk of adverse health outcomes. In addition, the seasonal variation in length of daylight is more pronounced at northern latitudes. Sunrise for the majority of months in a year at 9:30, dear Oregonians?
So why on earth mandate permanent jet lag? Whose demands could outweigh the advice of scientists across the board? Why, the economy’s, of course. Like clockwork.
“Proponents say that extra daylight in the evening increases opportunities for commerce and recreation, as people prefer to shop and exercise during daylight hours.” (Ref.) More time to spend money when it’s still light outside! Less crime which only happens under the mantel of darkness! (Apparently catalytic converter thieves are ignorant to the cover of darkness in the mornings, then. Maybe they like to sleep late…)
Our memories are short.
We’ve tried permanent daylight saving time twice before and it ended up disastrously. The UK installed it once before and ended it early. Russia tried it once, so did India, both abandoning it in no time.
It hurts humans.
Salvador Dali The Persistence of Memory (1931)
Of course the harm is insidious, not revealing itself until time has passed, with the exception of the immediate danger to school kids on their walk to school in the dark. This was also true for emerging cancers of whole groups of industrial workers. For decades, the luminous dial industry used young women to paint the dials of watches with paint containing radium. They were taught to tip their paint brushes on the tongue to make a sharp brush point; this procedure resulted in the ingestion of considerable radium leading to systemic uptake of some of the ingested radium. These massive intakes of emulsions of pure radium salts resulted in severe skeletal injuries and bone sarcomas of the dial painters.
Maybe we should gather all the clocks and walk them right out to fields, allowing our bodies to realign with exposure to natural light. Walk by the voting booth before, though, to make sure you install a Congress that is attuned to science when legislating for all of us. VOTE TOMORROW!
Jacek Yerka Nauka Chodzenia ( Learning to Walk) (2005)
I stand corrected and appreciate the countless emails gently scolding me for pegging LBJ as a Republican in one of this week’s blogs. My only excuse: I was 11 years old in Germany when he served as President… so now I know.
I also learned this week a few facts about fire season, given that the sight of endless burnt forests on the way to Central Oregon had made an emotional impact which I tried to counterbalance with reading about facts. Useless exercise, of course, since the newly apprehended facts triggered more of the same emotions…
For much of the American West fire season is now almost year-round. Warmer temperatures cause earlier snowmelt which allows vegetation to dry out. There is more atmospheric thirst, technically called evaporative demand, ever increasing due to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas levels. The concept basically quantifies the potential loss of water from the surface as driven by atmospheric factors including temperature, wind speed, humidity and cloud cover.
With more water vapor sucked up into the atmosphere, you have less water that drains into streams, wetlands and aquifers, particularly in the SouthWest. In turn, soil and vegetation become drier, increasing the risk of forest fires, and also hampering tree regeneration after they were hurt. Tree mortality soars.
In other words, it is not just the supply side – too little rain – that has changed. There is also the demand side – the warmer atmosphere collects and holds more water – that is affecting drought conditions. When water is increasingly drawn from the land surface through evaporation and transpiration, there is less available for plants, animals and humans.
The subsequently increased dryness of flammable materials – fuel aridity – has approximately doubled the Western forest fire area, and extended the times of year in which fires can be expected. As of July 15, 5,238,977 acres have burned in U.S. wildfires.
Less water in the soil, of course, means also that agricultural crops need more watering, putting demands on water sources that themselves have dried up. Crops in the Rio Grande Basin, for example, where some of New Mexico’s blazes burned this spring, need 8% to 15% more irrigation now than they did in 1980. (Ref.)
Humans have not only contributed to the frequency and intensity of wildfires by warming the atmosphere which in turn leads to drier fuel conditions. They have also created a “fire deficit” by (understandably) suppressing small wildfires as quickly as possible across decades. That allowed a lot of flammable material to build up in our forests that are now feeding these mega fires, the biggest ones starting in 2020.
Here is a link to a story about the consequences for communities hit by fires and how they are trying to build back.
And here are Robert Frost’s two cents, who cold not possibly have intuited the current state of the world.
WE LIVE IN AN ERA where the necessity to decarbonize the world’s energy has become quite clear, even if the oil and gas-based industries fight tooth and nail against abandoning fossil fuels. To mitigate a climate catastrophe, we need to turn to other, sustainable modes for generating the energy that we need. Renewable energy, solar and wind sources, might be our best alternative, but they are facing enormous obstacles, political resistance by the fossil fuel monopoly being one of them. But they also are linked to very high installation costs, a lack of infrastructure, particularly adequately sized power storage systems. Electricity generation from natural sources does not necessarily happen during the peak electricity demand hours and given the volatility in generation as well as load, storage is a huge, but expensive component. Lack of policies, incentives and regulations have not exactly encouraged investment into these alternative sources either.
No surprise then, that we hear renewed calls for nuclear power as a reliable, “clean” source for energy, often accompanied by the promise that the old days of large, risky plants and unsolved storage problems of radioactive waste are gone.
As if.
I attended this year’s Hanford Journey, a day focused on environmental clean-up. Hanford was an integral part of the Manhattan Project which produced plutonium for the first atomic bombs dropped in Nagasaki and released massive toxins into the ground and Columbia river where it operated. The event, sponsored by Columbia Riverkeeper and Yakama Nation Environmental Restoration Waste Management (ERWM,) made abundantly clear that nuclear waste still presents a clear and present danger to our environment and the people who live near the rivers and polluted land. We don’t even have a handle on the current dangers, and yet people are advocating for increased use of nuclear power. Some are even claiming it is our ethical obligation to promote it as the only way to combat a climate catastrophe and promising that everything will be fine with the arrival – coming soon, if you invest in us! – of small modular reactors.
I was visiting as part of a film crew exploring the possibility of making a documentary film about the current state of nuclear power development. The interest in the topic had evolved straight out of our last films, Necessity (Oil, Water and Climate Resistance//Climate Justice and the Thin Green Line) which revealed the particular vulnerability of tribal nations to environmental pollutants. (An ArtsWatch review of the films by Marc Mohan can be found here.)
Both Hanford Journey sponsors were quite helpful in providing an opportunity for all of us to learn about the history of the clean-up efforts, view the site from boat, and talk to and hear from people who are involved in the struggle. The Yakama Nation ERWM program engages in oversight of this process and issues affecting Hanford Site natural resources. Their involvement includes participation in technical, project management, policy meetings on response and natural resource damage actions, as well as oversight of cultural resource compliance. The Columbia Riverkeeper’s mission is “to protect and restore the water quality of the Columbia River and all life connected to it, from the headwaters to the Pacific Ocean.” The organization uses legal advocacy and community organizing in numerous conservation efforts.
Map of the Hanford Site —- Simone Anter, Staff Attorney, Columbia Riverkeeper
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY, with a sense of purpose and hope delivered by multiple speakers, honoring the legacy of tribal environmental leader Russell Jim and promising to continue his mission of Hanford clean up to ensure the safety of future generations. Davis Washines, Government Relations Liaison, Yakama Nation and DNR Fisheries Resource Program for Superfund Section, talked about the history of the people indigenous to the region and their relationship with the river, the price they paid from the exposure to life-threatening pollutants and the governmental hesitancy to fully keep clean-up commitments.
Davis Washines, Government Relations Liaison, Yakama Nation and DNR Fisheries Resource Program for Superfund Section
Laura Watson, Director of the Washington Department of Ecology, evaluated how few resources are spent and how many more are needed. “The Hanford site is and remains one of the most contaminated sites in the world, and is probably the most complicated cleanup that’s ever been undertaken in human history.” Many more talked about what the situation meant for them and their families, past and present.
Kids were playing in the water, families and friends gathered for group pictures, lunch was served.
Puyallup Canoe Family
I met Ellia-Lee Jim who had been selected to be Miss ’22-’23 Yakama Nation, and chatted with Denise Reed, Puyallup and Quileutea cultural coordinator, who wore beautiful items she made with cedar weaving which she also teaches.
Ellia-Lee Jim
Denise Reed and her cedar woven hat and belt
Multiple nonprofit groups, including The Hanford Challenge and Heart of America Northwest, were on-site to educate and encourage us to become involved with ongoing advocacy efforts. A major issue right now, for example, is the Department of Energy’s attempt to reclassify high-level waste at the Hanford site to low-level waste which will allow cleanup shortcuts and unsafe disposal.
Brett VandenHeuvel, the soon-to-be-former Executive Director of the Columbia Riverkeeper (Lauren Goldberg will be his successor on August 1,) drove us from the Mattawa event site to the river, where boats, run by Tri-City Guide Service, took us out onto the Columbia and to the B reactor — one of nine plutonium reactors built at Hanford. (There was also a hike out to White Bluffs and the Hanford Reach National Monument to view the H, DR, D and F plutonium reactors, which I had to miss.)
Archeologist and ERWM advocate Rose Ferri was our guide on the boat, helping to understand the history of the Hanford Reach, one of the few remaining stretches of river where chinook salmon spawn in significant numbers, a stretch of 51 mile, to be precise, the last remaining free-flowing portion of the 1,212 miles of the Columbia.
Rose Ferri
The National Monument contains an insane number of species overall – details can be found here – all of whom depend on being protected from toxic and radioactive pollution from the Hanford site. Because Hanford is off limits to visitors, the land has been undisturbed for years, a buffer zone between ecological disaster and agricultural industries, beautiful in its sparsity.
THE HANFORD NUCLEAR SITE has been operating since 1943, after the forced removal of the people who lived on the 580 square miles on which 9 reactors were built. 1855 treaty rights to use the land for fishing, hunting and gathering, signed by the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR), the Nez Perce Tribe, and the Wanapum, were often not honored. During the 40 years of plutonium production, cesium and iodine were generated, and chromium, nitrate, tritium, strontium-90, trichloroethene and uranium, among others, leaked into the soil and seeped into the groundwater.
There were some single-shell underground storage tanks for the most dangerous liquids, but the rest flowed freely. The last reactor was shut down in 1987. Clean-up began – theoretically – in 1989 when the U.S. Dept. of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Washington State signed a Tri-Party Agreement. Only in the year 2000 were 2,535 tons of irradiated nuclear fuel in the K Basin along the Columbia River transferred into dry storage. In the following years treatment and immobilization plants were constructed, but will only be fully operative in 2023 from last I heard. Weapons grade plutonium was transferred to South Carolina.
In 2013 we learned that the single-shell tanks leak, and 4 years later one of the PUREX tunnels containing highly radioactive waste partially collapses. Ignoring these warning signs of potential catastrophe, the U.S.Department of Energy decided on a new interpretation of which kind of waste requires most stringent storage requirements in 2019.
“…. “high-level nuclear waste” (HLW) under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) that would exclude some dangerous waste traditionally considered HLW from stringent storage requirements. For over 50 years, the term HLW, as defined in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (AEA) and the NWPA, required the disposal of this most toxic and radioactive waste in deep geologic formations to protect public health. Energy’s new interpretation opens the door for less robust cleanup and the possibility of more waste remaining at Hanford.” (Ref.)
The Tribes and their allies continue to fight for a comprehensive, fully funded, thorough clean-up. Events like Hanford Journey are one way of getting informations out into the public, and familiarizing those of us who are able to attend and experience the landscape, with the history and the scientific consequences of delayed or compromised action. I wish that information could be even more widely spread.
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I DROVE BACK TO RICHLAND, WA, across the Vernita bridge ,
and passed by a long stretched mountain, Lalíík, or Rattlesnake Mountain, that I had just seen from a very different perspective. I had been told it was the tallest treeless mountain in the world, sacred to Tribes in the region. It is designated a Traditional Cultural Property (TCP), a property that “is eligible for inclusionn the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) based on its associations with the cultural practices, traditions, beliefs, lifeways, arts, crafts, or social institutions of a living community.“(Ref.) At least that sacred mountain had been cleaned up with funds from a 2010 Recovery Act.
The whole story concerning Hanford and the depth of its operational impact on the Tribes of the region can only be understood if you have a glimpse of what it implies for their culture, never mind their existential dependence on non-toxic fish. Is that incorporated into the narratives that are officially told? I was about to find out.
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THE REACH MUSEUM in Richland, WA, is a beautiful new structure with a mission statement that asserts inclusivity. Open since 2014, it offers various exhibits, with a permanent one on the Manhattan Project and the Hanford enterprise among them.
The staff is super helpful and friendly, the grounds are gorgeous and represent the beauty of the region. You are greeted outside with lots of affirmative information about the “clean” source of power that is nuclear energy.
You are also immediately made aware by historic photographs of trailer parks (and a real trailer) during the peak employment years of Hanford, that the region benefitted economically during times of hardship due to work opportunities. Some 50.000 people arrived at this remote region, families included. Not a mention though, there, whether these opportunities of housing and work were available to the indigenous inhabitants who were driven from their land by the Manhattan project.
The website for the museum is richly informative and emphasizes a desire to tell stories from differential perspectives and acknowledges their Native American partners “who historically used this region—a gathering place of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, the Wanapum people, and the Nez Perce Tribe who cared for this land since time immemorial.”
As far as I could see, one statement poster, in a gallery that, overall, lays out the developments, successes and trials of the Manhattan Project (Gallery 2,) speaks to tribal presence. Acknowledging expulsion, but not going into anything further.
The focus is on the war effort,
the feats of engineering,
and the impact on Cold War developments.
Overall, a well designed, informative exhibition with a combination of local and (inter)national historical information.
To their credit, some safety considerations are mentioned, however mostly regarding the workers in an environment that was experimental in its newness, with less attention to the continuing concerns. The printed and easily accessible materials in this room were quiet about the continuing poisonous legacy and unsolved problem of long-term nuclear waste storage, however, unless I missed something, which was of course entirely possible after a long, intense day.
What would Albert think?
If you check out the educational resources on their website, the topics of Shrub – Steppe and Geologic Past are fabulously covered. In detail, comprehensive, engaging. The topics of the Hanford Legacy and Columbia River Resources are announced to be coming soon. Given the centrality of those topics as well as the controversy attached to them, in some ways, I wondered why they have not yet been designed. Your guess is as good as mine.
I have no intention to diss a museum I rather liked. I am fully aware how hard it is, particularly during this pandemic, to keep small institutions alive, much less current. But my question about how information about the continual danger of toxic environments, long-term storage of radioactive waste and un-remediated injustice of treaty betrayals reaches the mainstream, remains. This is particularly important now that calls for renewed efforts and investments into nuclear energy are getting louder. It might, or might not be a solution to our energy woes – decisions have to be based on knowledge of all the facts, though. Columbia Riverkeeper and tribal ambassadors work hard and, undoubtedly, effectively in many regards to spread the word. It is time, that the rest of us follow suit.
Stick with me, folks, even if the mere mention of “scientificdata” makes some of you want to shut your ears and avert your eyes. It’s going to be a playful, wild dive into the patterns of wind and water, electricity and pollution, geological formations and human experience around the Columbia river basin. All brought to you by yet another innovative artist, Amanda Triplett, and her team of Lewis & Clark College students involved in Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II project, tackling the translation of numbers into pictures or something one can see – data visualization – with remarkable creativity.
Italo Calvino’s words about translation applied to his own work being translated into many languages, exposing his work to the world beyond Italy. One of his seminal books, Invisible Cities, focused on the reverse, bringing the world to someone who lacked access despite being the ruler of endless countries. The Venetian explorer Marco Polo told the emperor of Mongolia, Kublai Khan, about the truths found in his realm, translating foreign concepts into a form that could be easily grasped and universally understood.
We are looking at bridge building then, crossovers between different worlds. In some ways one can think of the domains of science and art in this way as well, as two different countries with different languages that need translation. Two realms in need of connection.
All photographs of individual small fiber sculptures are from the tapestry wall that is part of the project process. Participants were encouraged to “play” with recycled fabric bits and pieces.
Science is a domain ruled by methodic, structurally constrained exploration of data intended to add to a knowledge base that might explain our world. That knowledge base is organized in the form of testable predictions derived from our hypotheses of how our universe functions.
Art is a domain that frequently wants to explain the world as well, rather than just depict it. But the approach is much less regulated. No immutable rules as seen in the scientific method, no constraints on what counts or doesn’t count as fact, no limits to emotional engagement or manipulation. In (admittedly overly) simplistic terms, science wants us to know and understand, art wants to make us think and feel.
Both tell a story, constrained by rigid rules for science, open to unlimited embellishment for art. The language they use to tell their story is shaped by those factors. So how then do you translate from one to the other? And, importantly why would you want to do that in the first place?
You might argue that science and art embrace complimentary ways of viewing reality which are not a substitute for each other. Yet translating scientific data into something other than numbers, or even into art, when done successfully, has major advantages. For one, it might reach many more eyes and ears than any old scientific paper, given the sad fact that a lot of people have negative associations to scientific data or a fear of approaching them. They might not trust them, or they might not understand them, given the lack of science education all around. They might not have the patience to wade through them, or they might not have access in the first place, given that so much has to be gathered to depict a complete story. Importantly, something we can see rather than just reading about it, might deliver much more of an emotional punch which in turn could translate into engagement with the issues, or action. If a picture is worth a thousand words, think what sculpture might do to a million numbers…
This was the impetus for Amanda Triplett’s approach to interacting with her college students, colleagues and assorted scholars when devising a plan to translate the scientific data collected around the Columbia river and NW regions into a visual language. (Her contributors can be found listed below.) She utilized the many resources available on a college campus, access to the folks from environmental sciences, data librarians, tech support and so on, and in the process made connections between the various fields, translating various “languages” into an artistic narrative.
The Edging Plate for Last Year’s Exquisite Gorge Print Project, with Lewis&Clark Artists also covering Section 2, From Mile 110 to McGowan Point
The artist in front of a gallery wall depicting the accumulated data and cut patterns
The process as it unfolded can be currently seen documented on the walls and displays of Lewis & Clark’s Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery. (It’s up until July 28th. Open Monday-Thursday 10:00am-2:00pm except July 4th.) It is still an active workshop, with fiber details being created, and the final sculpture put together. Really worth a visit, parking on the empty campus is easy and free, and public transport available.
“All translation is a compromise – the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic.” — Benjamin Jowett
The first steps included which data to look for and to grasp what data visualization implies. It is basically the practice of translating numbers into a visual context, so they are more easily understood and allow us to find patterns or trends or outliers, things that do not conform with what we understand to be the norm.
Here is a simple example: if you look for advice on when there are the fewest number of visitors at Portland Art Museum so you can safely visit, or be least disturbed, all you have to do is go to Google Maps. They offer a picture, a bar graph that shows you in simple form what otherwise would involve reading through hundreds of statistic on daily visitor rates and density. And that still would not allow you to decide in the moment, which is the advantage of these interactive live maps provided by the institutions, coded in red bars. Voila, this Friday at 11 a.m. was the best time to visit.
Google Jam Board from Brainstorming Session
There are tons of ways in which data can be presented visually. Bar graphs, scatterplots, heat maps, box plots, line graphs, pie charts, area charts, choropleth maps and histograms all serve particular purposes. The participating students in this project all learned about these tools with the very concrete goal in mind how to represent the information about the Columbia river region in yet a different modus: using fiber to create art. Due to the pandemic, the initial months of the project took place on zoom, with Google jam boards collecting and displaying information that might be relevant. The digital brainstorming centered on representing data, but also concerned ways of understanding how traditional use, or mis-use, and abuse of data can influence how we see the world.
Once back in person, the group listened to experts, had discussion sections, took a field trip to the river and Bonneville Dam for data collection, and learned from presentations by the Columbia River Keepers about the current state of affairs of environmental facts, woes included. It became clear that all things are interconnected and cannot be judged in isolation. Dams, as just one example, provide hydro-power and regulate shipping. A good thing from a consumer perspective, but they also destroy fish habitats and spawning abilities, affecting not just salmon populations but also the cultures of Native Americans on whose land dams were built and who depend on salmon for existential and ceremonial reasons. Water use, as another example, benefits agricultural businesses, but stands in competition with river health and fishing rights in times of increasing droughts.
But how to translate this into fiber art?
Here are three examples that were generated by the project participants:
1. Energy across Oregon and Washington is drawn from multiple sources in varying amounts. Hydropower, harnessed by the dams, generates about 48%, natural gas base load is next (18%) and in descending order coal, wind, natural gas peak load, nuclear, biomass and solar are filling our needs. Each energy source is color coded.
A distribution of these resources, as seen in the pie-chart data visualization was knitted or crocheted with the exact amount of stitches and colors representing each percentage, surrounding a lightbulb representing electricity use.
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2. Solid pollutants like fishing lines, mesh bags and other odds and ends were collected from the river and fabricated into a sculptural configuration (photograph below)to visualize what sickens the water and fish. The pebbles beneath represent parts of the carbon cycle. Carbon sinks, like forests and oceans of a certain temperature, absorb emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, yet are increasingly depleted. Carbon sources, on the other hand, like the burning of fuel stored in fossils, and maintaining large livestock operations, are continually in use or even increasing, despite the havoc they wreak on our climate.
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3. Other participants looked at the composition of the river, including the geological history of the Columbia River Basalt Group which consists of seven formations: The Steens Basalt, Imnaha Basalt, Grande Ronde Basalt, Picture Gorge Basalt, Prineville Basalt, Wanapum Basalt, and Saddle Mountains Basalt. Many of these formations are subdivided into formal and informal members and flows. One proposal, in the process of being beautifully executed right now, was to make a topographic map.
And then, of course, there is the river itself with its eddies and currents, its waves and flow, carefully constructed with recycled fabrics, salvaged upholstery, some wool, the center piece of the display.
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“Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.” — Anthony Burgess
I met Amanda Triplett 2 years ago when I first wrote about her work for Oregon Arts Watch.
“TRIPLETT HOLDS A B.A. in Art and Art History from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Starting out as a performance major, she soon switched to visual art, mostly focused on drawing and other works on paper. She credits the fact that she was raised in fabric-rich societies like Egypt and Taiwan, with parents later living in India, with her eventual settling on fiber sculptures. Her intention to work with discarded materials found the perfect source: Shortly after she moved to Portland from California in 2016 she was awarded one of the artist-in-residence spots at Glean, “a juried art program that taps into the creativity of artists to inspire people to think about their consumption habits, the waste they generate and the resources they throw away.” They work in partnership with Recology Portland; Metro, the regional government that manages the Portland area’s garbage and recycling system; and crackedpots, a nonprofit environmental arts organization.”
She most recently exhibited at Shift Gallery in Seattle and is currently working on a project, Morphogenesis, on weekends as an artist in residence at Mary Olson Farm and White River Valley Museum in Auburn, WA.
I was not surprised to see her work now includes an important educational aspect: marrying together aspects of art and science, putting the A into the STEM fields, echoing what is going on in the larger world with the arrival of STEAM. STEAM is an educational approach to learning that uses Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics as access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking. The hoped-for end results are students who feel at home in scientific fields as well as the arts and use both approaches to enhance their problem solving and functioning in an increasingly data-oriented world. (Ref.)
Reports on the fruitfulness of collaboration between scientists and artists are more and more coming into view, and much is written about how creativity is a common denominator in the thinking of both professions.
In fact, two years ago, The Smithsonian turned to art to get out a message that scientists had been clamoring about loudly – and in vain – for decades with their tools of data-driven messaging. The exhibition, Unsettled Nature – Artists reflect on the Age of Humans, delivered information with an emotional punch, much of it sensitive photography of man-made ecological disasters, but also Bethany Taylor’s woven tapestries of varied ecosystems. Art was used to communicate the gravity of our planet’s situation established by scientific inquiry.
Bethany Taylor
Science organizations have started to acknowledge the important role that art can play, with some even holding juried art contests like, for example, the Materials Research Society, (MRS) with they annual Science as Art competition. Pictures are in the link – some pretty incredible!)
What I admire about Triplett’s approach is her ability to keep the interconnectedness of the two domains, art and science, in focus, but also remain dedicated to the language of her own field. Even with translation from the science end into the visual arts realm, there is a focus on playfulness that is a hallmark of her artistic practice. One that she shares with her students, encouraging them to experiment with tactile materials of all sorts and, importantly, try out how it feels to break the rules. There is a non-quantifiable, and in some ways non-translatable aspect to making art, one that centers on pleasure.
Not the pleasure of a satisfactory scientific result, or the pleasure of having had the right ideas now confirmed by the data, not the pleasure at one’s cleverness of designing a brilliant experimental design.
Instead it is the pleasure of the tactile exploration of fiber, seeing a fantasy or an imaginary construct come into existence, the freedom to bend the rules, to bring your very own creative impulses into the open. It is pleasure in the process, not linked to outcome. To this purpose, all participants are encouraged to create something with fiber, bits and pieces that can be selected from a basket. The growing display on the walls of the Hoffman Gallery are proof positive how playfulness translates into beauty.
***
“The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.” — Leonardo Sciascia
We’ll see the final sculpture, the translation tapestry, in August at Maryhill Museum. Or the other side of it, as the case may be. In the meantime, here is my own data collection during the interview, trying to weave stories out of snippets. Then there’s my data visualization with fiber remnants, translating interconnectedness, flow and play. In the spirit of Lewis Caroll’s remarks:
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
Section 2 Group featured today:
The Exquisite Gorge Project II: Fiber Arts: Section 2 features the work of the following Lewis & Clark student artists:
Brynne Anderson, Melissa Even, Margo Gaillard, Jones Kelly, Haley Ledford, Ella Martin.
More folks who have been apart of the process and supported the project:
Tammy Jo Wilson, Visual Arts & Technology Program Manager, Professor Matt Johnston, Art History, Professor Jessica Kleiss, Environmental Studies, Professor Lizzy Clyne, Environmental Studies, Justin Counts, Educational Technology Specialist, Mark Dahl, Director of Watzek Library, Ethan Davis, Digital and Data Science Specialist, Parvaneh Abbaspour, Science and Data Services Librarian, Rachel McKenna, Art Department 3D Technical Support, Kate Murphy, Community Organizer, Columbia Riverkeeper, The Columbia Fiber Arts Guild, Lewis & Clark Students: Katie Alker, Francisco Perozo, Gwenneth Jergens, Ava Westlin, Sarah Bourne.
I think we missed it twice in 40 years, our annual pilgrimage to a zoo on “ZooDay.” It is a commemoration of our first date ever at the Bronx zoo in NYC, all those centuries ago. Since we misremembered the original date by about 2 weeks when we first went back, we decided to add two weeks to the calendar every year and so it has been rotating through all seasons. This year it was cold, like all of this interminably rainy spring.
Traditionally a pilgrimage is defined as a journey, “often into an unknown or foreign place, where a person goes in search of new or expanded meaning about their self, others, nature, or a higher good, through the experience. It can lead to a personal transformation, after which the pilgrim returns to their daily life,” tells me my trusted Wikipedia. What we are doing at the zoo is not exactly a pilgrimage, but a celebration of a journey together – plenty of unknown places encountered there as well, and, yes, personal transformation.
I sometimes wonder why we stick to it (the zoo date, not the marriage!) Zoos elicit mixed feelings – how can you not feel for living beings put into cages? Then again, some species only escape extinction because zoos these days enable them to live and, with luck, procreate. And certainly zoos have an important educational function, allowing kids cut off from nature to experience first glimpses of awe when seeing something beyond a two-dimensional screen. At least that was what I thought, before reading some more on it.
There is quite a bit of smart writing around the controversy of zoos’ legitimacy these days. Here is a list of zoo-related books that cover a wide array of topics. Many argue that zoos should be abandoned. The most fascinating, for me at least, is a recent book called Zoo Studies, an interdisciplinary collection that examines zoos from historical, philosophical, social, and cultural perspectives, edited by Tracy McDonald and Daniel Vandersommers. And here is a fun paper, What’s new at the zoo?, that looks at the last decade of research results around zoo-related issues, including whether animals have human-like emotions and should be afforded the rights of people.
(The New York York Court of Appeals, by the way, ruled this week that animals are not persons in the legal sense, and therefor can be denied fundamental human rights, like not being illegally imprisoned in zoos. The advocacy group who sued on behalf of an elephant interestingly used the legal construct of habeas corpus, in vain. (Funny how the Supreme Court decided that corporations are persons, for even longer than Citizens United, when our closest biological relatives are not, but that is a story for another day.)
There are many articles around claiming that science has “proven” that animals have emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, etc.), even complex emotions (shame, for example), like humans. One that caught my eye was a study about pigs that were deemed optimistic. The pigs were conditioned to two different sounds that signaled either something positive (food) or something unpleasant. They quickly learned to approach the good and avoid the bad. They were then put in differing environments – the lucky pigs got room to roam, and stimulating interactive toys. The control group pigs were in small cages with one non-interactive toy. Next they were presented with a novel sound, and, surprise, the stimulated pigs approached it, the other ones avoided it. Conclusion by the research team: good “mood” or stimulation fosters “optimism” in their research participants. They’ll approach in hopes the goodies will come.
I have a beef with that pork interpretation: Let’s start with Occam’s razor which is basically a scientific principle that says you should always prefer simpler explanations over complicated ones (parsimony). Why is this? The answer has several parts, but at the least, you should put into your theory only things that are truly demanded by the evidence, and no more.
The notion of pig optimism tramples that principle. First, let’s be clear that the evidence that’s at issue is nothing more than a behavior of approach or avoidance. That’s all. Where is the evidence here that in any way speaks to the pigs’ mood or emotions much less complex emotions?
How should we think about these pigs? One of the classic principles of behavior is Thorndike’s Law of Effect which basically means if you do something and it has a good result, you keep at it. If you do something and it turns out badly, you’ll stop. This principle explains many bits of human behavior but it also explains the behavior of a range of other animals, including organisms as simple as sea slugs. And that is all the theory you need for the pigs.
In the enriched environment the pigs saw novel objects, approached them, found them to be not harmful and in some way useful. That encouraged a habit of approaching novel objects. They learned to generalize broadly, in contrast to the control group who was provided only with a narrow gradient of experience. The pig did not have to develop a world view of the sort we might call optimism, the pig did not have to develop any feelings about this, and the pig didn’t need any brain sophistication to follow the Law of Effect. I say again: extraordinarily simple organism follow that law, with no implications for what they feel or believe.
Is it possible that pigs have feelings? Yes, I suppose. But if this behavior counts as evidence, then we lose any hope of figuring out which animals are complex enough to feel emotions and which are not. Here is a really interesting overview of the issues, anthropomorphism included, by Philipp Ball, a science writer.
And on a completely unrelated topic, involving a pig that elicits complex emotions rather than having them: the highest GermanCourt just decided this week that a 13th century stone relief of a huge sow suckling identifiably Jewish people, with a Rabbi lifting the pig’s tail and staring into her anus, can remain in place above a famous church door. Jewish plaintiffs had gone to court to have the anti-Semitic sculpture removed, unsuccessfully. The BGH ruled that the church in Wittenberg (where Martin Luther – a rabid anti-Semite himself – once preached) had done enough to transform the sculpture into a “memorial,” by adding a bronze baseplate and a nearby display with an explanatory text. The sculpture is known as Juden Sau, Jewish Sow, a derogatory term for Jewish people used then and now by anti-Semitic Germans. For much longer than since the first ever zoo was ever established in 1793 in France….
Of course, not a single photograph of a pig. At least it’s the title of today’s music – the beautiful sound track for a movie I still have not seen but am told I have to…Pig.
“Guns symbolize the power of a minority over the majority, and they’ve become the icons of a party that has become a cult seeking minority power through the stripping away of voting rights and persecution of women, immigrants, black people, queer people, trans people – all of whom have been targeted by mass shootings in recent years.” –Rebecca Solnit
Agnotology is another word I had to look up in the dictionary. It refers to the study of ignorance, and the ways in which ignorance can be the outcome of acts of interference with your learning. Ignorance, then, not just as the absence of knowledge, but the product of cultural or political processes designed toprevent you from knowing.
(Photographs today are from the museum at Fort Sumter, the site of the start of the American Civil War, and graves of the fallen in Charleston, South Carolina, mostly decked with confederate flags and visited by birds.) I approached the monument by boat a few years back.
According to Proctor the “cultural production of ignorance” has been instrumental for the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. It is now embraced by the gun lobby as well. (I am summarizing what I learned here.)
Think of things that can make you sick: tobacco, sugary foods, chemicals applied for agricultural use, poisoning ground water, to name just a few. The industries peddling these commodities are focused on certain propaganda. You can cast doubt on the scientific linkage between cigarettes and cancer, for example. You can shield producers and sellers from scrutiny. And you can shift the debate to issues of “personal responsibility.” Same for things that sicken the planet: you can cast doubt on the relationship between fossil fuel use and climate change, protect the oil industry from scrutiny, and shift responsibility to the consumer, rather than reveal structural policies that harm.
With regard to guns that kill: you can prevent research from being done (or revealed) that shows the true causes for gun violence, including objective measures of what freely available gun access implies. You can spare the industry any liability, and you can blame individual factors, like mental health, or loosening family structures, or grooming teachers, or sexual mores or video games – you name it, all with the goal to prevent policies that curb the unconstrained purchase of arms.
And last but not least, you can sell alternative “legal scholarship,” which eventually makes it upstream to the courts when interpreting 2nd Amendment origins and meanings.
Given the amount of misinformation, what DO we know about the history of gun laws? The first law prohibiting guns for certain people was enforced in Virginia in 1633. No guns for Native Americans. Other colonies followed suit. Enslavers, too, wasted no time (Source here):
As early as 1639, on the other hand, laws were requiring White men to be armed to be able to act as militias controlling the enslaved population.
Eventually the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution was written not to favor individual gun use but for the protection of these slave-controlling militias, so that no-one could disarm them and disadvantage the Southern, slave-holding states who needed their might.
Note the phrasing in the museum annotation (below images of slaves) above. “only a small percentage…” as if that makes it less egregious. The rest was sold into slavery in the Caribbean and Brazil, with North American interests in plantations fed there as well. And they brought sickness to the continent! How dare they?
Below the focus on the variability of slavery experiences almost suggest there were some conditions that weren’t as bad as others, and prosperity demanded it!
Fast forward to the 20th century. The NRA early on approved of legislation limiting access to certain weapons, like the National Firearm Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968. Things changed, though, with the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement and the New Deal, expanding the powers of government and altering structural hierarchies of US society. Fierce backlash happened among those seeing their status threatened, and a push towards unfettered arming of men. In the 1990s we saw a growing militia (Christian white power) movement in response to Clinton’s gun laws. (Think Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas.) These extreme right wing forces subscribe to the “insurrection theory” of the 2nd Amendment, which says that the 2nd Amendment protects the unconditional right to bear arms for self-defense and to rebel against a tyrannical government. If and when a government turns oppressive, private citizens have a duty to take up arms against the government. The Proud Boys were just one division that put this into action, among other things, during the January 6th storming of the Capitol.
By 2007 the majority of justices on the Supreme Court had been appointed by presidents who were members of the NRA. In D.C. vs. Heller, Scalia argued that the 2nd Amendment protects an individual’s right to own guns (unconnected to a well-regulated militia), but vaguely implied that there were limits to the right, frustrating both gun control voices and the NRA folks who had never seen a limit they liked, as far as their own desires were concerned
If you can tolerate a style of writing that does not shy away from a somewhat excessive use of expletives, I highly recommend reading Elie Mystal’s Allow Me To Retort, an analysis of the Constitution in extremely accessible form, with insights into the 2nd Amendment in particular. It is a short, brilliant primer. Here is a review that captures everything I felt after finishing this book.
A radical change to the law is expected to be handed down by the Supreme Court this month, expanding 2nd Amendment rights. Here is is the Brennan Center for Justice‘s full analysis of what we will likely face. It is worth noting that once the door has been opened to prohibit the government from sensible regulations, as is expected here with regard to carrying guns, other regulative power might soon be taken away as well: environmental protection, public health requirements, work place safety, to name just a view.
It is no surprise, then, that the teaching of history as it unfolded, and of the conditions some try to maintain (most Americans want stricter gun laws), is anathema to those who want to turn the clock back, weapons in hand to meet a government that does not please them (after they meet their neighbors, who do not please them either given the neighbors’ quest for righting the injustices of a racially segregated society.) They do everything to obscure and obfuscate the knowledge that could empower true democratic policies and decision making and impact the sales of deadly military-style weapons and the ideological purposes they serve – agnotology in action. A Supreme Court undermining majority rule acts as the hand maid.
Want to come for a walk? Amble through wet meadows and woods where even the air takes on a green sheen?
Hawthorne, elderberry and ash trees
Where the sun has halos in those 5 minutes it agrees to come out of the clouds, before the showers return?
I walked along the Columbia river on Sauvie Island, so high with all the precipitation that the trees on the shores were submerged.
I approached the Willamette slough, where the pelicans rested until a fledging eagle chased them, descending from the perch where s/he had hung out with the parents.
I spotted yellow – the gold finches,
the yellow warblers,
and the Western Tanagers, not shy at all and in remarkable numbers.
It made me think of numbers, and how they have to be seen in context.
In this week you likely saw the announcement of the horrific milestone that the US had now suffered, one million deaths. Perhaps you didn’t see the reports, that by some estimates 300.000 of this people would likely have survived if they had been vaccinated. The anti-vaxx movement, of course, is fueled by many influences, but one influence seems to be underemphasized.
Rufus Towhee
There is a classic statement by CP Snow, still relevant now.
“A good many times I have been present at gathering of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold, it was also negative. Yet I was asking something that is the scientific equivalent of: have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, what do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language.”
Snow’s concern was not specifically with scientific illiteracy. Instead, the concern was that people find it genuinely acceptable, and in some circles a point of pride, to have no understanding of science or math. Many times, I have heard people say with defiance: I don’t do math.”
The problem here is not ignorance about differential equations. The problem is revealed when we look at examples in which extraordinarily simple mathematical concepts change enormously how you think about central issues.
Pink Hawthorne
As an example, why are people not taking Covid seriously? Let us imagine, that the one million who died had a social circle of 30 people each. That means 30 million Americans have had direct contact with a Covid death. But now consider that approximately 85 million people have been infected in the US. If each of those has a circle of 30, then the vast majority of the country does know someone (or many) directly who did ok, but does not know anyone directly who died. Is it any wonder then, that vast numbers of Americans buy crazy claims like this is just a strong version of the flu — because that is the pattern of their lived experience, which outweighs dry numbers any old time.
Two Daddy Longlegs making more Daddy Longlegs
Totally different example: In the Pacific NW the Northern spotted owl may well go extinct. The most recent threat is from competition with a different species of owl, the barred owl. In a desperate response, the government has been killing barred owls in specified regions to open territory for the Northern spotted. So far, it looks like killing 2400 barred owls across ten years allowed the Northern spotted owls in those territories to survive. In places where the barred owls were left alone, the Northern spotted experienced serious decline, increasing the danger of complete extinction. You may still find this preservation strategy unacceptable, but, when you ask about costs and benefits, you might take into account that the barred owl is extremely common and thriving. The Northern spotted owl could be wiped out. So would you be willing to sacrifice, let’s say, 2% of one species in order to gain, let’s say, a 20 or 30% increase in another? These are not the real numbers, and the research is not clear yet on what the absolute numbers are. But surely the question takes on a different coloration if you look at the number of owls in the denominator.
Vultures were out en masse
One more example with a very simple character: many jurisdictions have just gone through elections, and a prominent argument from the right is that we need to do more to combat the crime wave that is ongoing in our country. The evidence for this crime wave is visible to anyone who even glances at the headlines. The problem, however, is that this is a ridiculous way to gauge crime rates. Recent data confirm that crime rates in Oregon have actually gone down (however minimally), rather than up for the last interval tested (2020.)
If we are trying to persuade people to take Covid seriously, we need to be aware of their lived experience, and that understanding has to be shaped by simple calculations I have sketched here. We may disagree about owl protection policies, but in thinking it through we have to be alert to proportions, rather than raw numbers, and in thinking about crime rates, our votes and our tax $$ should be guided by real numbers, not scare stories. Since people proudly say “I don’t care about numbers,” they rely instead on short cuts that routinely give them answers miles off of what they’d get if they spent 2 minutes thinking about the numbers. It won’t end well.
My walk ended with the resident scrub jay, who always hangs out around the parking lot. So did a ranger from the park service or whatever official administrative body. Talk about numbers in context: they had found a single gypsy moth threat in 2020 on the island, none last year. Here she was spending a full day hanging dozens of traps for these pests on the trees, and that was just the beginning. If you can’t control the moths when you still have a chance with small populations, the trees are doomed. Wish the CDC acted the same…
Expect to see small green bags dotting the island. Likely too many to count.
I am taking next week off to have some down time. See you soon after that. You can count the days!
Music is by Bartok today – he included math, in particular expressions of the Fibonacci numbers, in many of his sonatas.
Maybe it was the cold. Maybe the decline in pollinators. The number of wildflowers were sparse. It made finding every single one a particular joy, of course, hah, another iris! Maybe this 231 acres Cooper Mountain park, new to me, never had that many to begin with, or it was still too early in the season. When trails announce Larkspur Meadow, and all you find are a few puny specimens of the plant, it does make you wonder, though.
Made me think about a recent book. If you have time, read the The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. It is a fascinating anthology of conversations between and presentations by some twenty scientists and humanists (artists and poets included), presented during a conference at UCSC Santa Cruz a few years go. As conferences go, this was surely an imaginative one: the topics of how we can live and progress on a damaged planet were divided under two headings concerning he Anthropocene: Ghosts and Monsters.
Ghosts referred to issues around landscapes altered by the violent extraction and modification during human expansion. Monsters concerned interspecies and intraspecies social interactions. The goal for all theses scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics was to suggest critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. A planet we share with other species, in other words, while making it inhabitable.
Dandelion and Wild Geranium
It is a book that has a wide range of topics, not to be read as a whole, but digested bit by bit, at least that worked for me with my aging brain. It will familiarize you with ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste, to name a few. We learn what has been harmed, what can be rescued, what needs adapting, and, importantly, how art can be of help in the process.
Lupine
It came to my mind on a walk on Sunday, a warm, sunny day so atypical for this dreadful April, where I found myself ambling through various biotopes: paths through old growth forests, along sunlit prairie, and in groves sheltering what remains of the oaks and freshly budding maple trees, both hung with veils of Spanish moss. Me and the rest of town – this is an easy 3.4 mile hike on Cooper Mountain near Beaverton and e v e r y o n e was out. Good for all of us – being in nature remains restorative, even when the damage is visible and seen, perhaps, by multitudes. Engaging with nature helps with (re)learning how to be in the world.
At least this was part of what Ursula Le Guin, a participant in the conference that led to the book, suggested: “To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.” She defined two possible approaches in ways I have cited before: “Science describes accurately from outside; poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates; poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe.” She explained: Skill in living, awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals.”
And here she put it in her inimitable poetic way:
THE STORY It’s just part of a story, actually quite a lot of stories, the part where the third son or the stepdaughter sent on the impossible mission through the uncanny forest comes across a fox with its paw caught in a trap or little sparrows fallen from the nest or some ants in trouble in a puddle of water. He frees the fox, she puts the fledglings in the nest, they get the ants safe to their ant-hill. The little fox will come back later and lead him to the castle where the princess is imprisoned, the sparrow will fly before her to where the golden egg is hidden, the ants will sort out every poppyseed for them from the heap of sand before the fatal morning, and I don’t think I can add much to this story. All my life it’s been telling me if I’ll only listen who the hero is and how to live happily ever after.
–Ursula Le Guin
I’d like to add to the focus on animals an acknowledgement of plants. People nowadays, kids in particular, know fewer plants than ever before. It is a phenomenon called Plant Blindness,the inability to notice or recognize plants in our own environment. The term was coined by two botanists, James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler, who originally proposed that we are blind to plants because they lack visual attention cues. They don’t have a face; they don’t move in the way that animals do; and they aren’t threatening. They look more like each other than animals do – and the human brain is geared to detect differences over similarities. We also favor things more familiar, and animal behavior is closer to humans in that regard, establishing some bio behavioral kinship. Add to that our general separation from nature, and you end up with people unable to identify more than a few plants.
Larkspur
This ignorance, echoed and anchored in the demise of academic instruction in plant biology, is all the more worrying given the role plants play in societal developments: global warming, food security and the need for new pharmaceuticals that might help in the fight against diseases. Without young people being drawn into plant sciences we might not be able to fight new plant diseases or develop plant strains adapted to changing climate conditions or discover new medications, and so on. In Great Britain you can no longer enroll for a botany degree, for example. Across the US, university Herbaria are closing. Funding is affected: 10 years ago plants made up 57% of the federal endangered species list – they received less than 4% of the endangered species funding! (Here is a good overview article on the consequences.)
Wild Strawberries
If schools fail at instruction, take the kids to the park. An emotional connection outweighs dry instruction in any case. Teach them how plants can be – are – heroes when it comes to their healing properties or their role in environmental protection – there are plenty of guides and apps for the phone available in case you’re not so sure yourself about names and species. Snap a picture and have an identification within a minute.
Prairie Meadow. I believe the yellow flower is Monkey flower, but am not sure.
Turn it into a treasure hunt to spur the kids’ interest. Who can find more larkspur than irises? Who spots the first saxifrage? Who can tell a strawberry by their blossom?
Saxifrage
Tell fairy tales where plants play a significant role (Hans Christian Andersen scored here, as do many Native American tales), seek out botanical gardens that help with education.
Lilies
I have my doubts about living happily ever after at which LeGuin’s poem hinted – but I believe walks are the moments when we can live happily, encountering spring’s renewal, however sparse, in all its beauty, and learn in the process.
I was in a foul mood yesterday, raging against the limitations that surgeries have imposed on my life. Just three years ago this week, I had exulted in a solo hike at Kasha-Katuwe National Monuments (Tent Rock) within the lands of the Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico. (I had described the hike here.) The canyon trail is a one-way trek into a narrow, “slot” canyon with a steep (630-ft) climb to the mesa top with excellent views of the Sangre de Cristo, Jemez, Sandia mountains and the Rio Grande Valley. Now I am exhausted after a few miles on flat territory at sea level…
OK: shift in perspective – first of all I HAD these glorious experiences, as the photos remind me and I can still hike somewhere. Secondly, I am snug in a safe place and not in a war zone. And finally, you never know what the future holds, with the right mindset.
Case in point: a blind linguistics professor named Sheri Wells-Jensen and a crew of eleven other disabled people are on a mission to prove that disabled people have what it takes to go to space. And not only that, but that they may have an edge over non-disabled people. The linguist had argued in a 2018 article in Scientific American that in emergency situations on board a space shuttle differently-abled people might be assets, since they could navigate in darkness, pay attention to signals that typical astronauts would not necessarily pick up, and communicate (if deaf, with ASL, for example) when other modes of communication failed. Astronauts in wheelchairs could save the 2.5 hours a day that the others have to use strength equipment to avoid muscle loss, to do research or repairs, etc.
The whole idea is to look at the strengths drawn from what are considered limitations and apply them. People started to explore it seriously. George T. Whitesides, the former chief of staff of NASA under Obama, and Anna Voelker, the founder of SciAccess, a non-profit organization dedicated to accessibility of the STEM fields to disabled adults and children proposed to do a test run with a diverse group of disabled people in a parabolic flight, to see what problems would arise with zero gravity and how to solve them. The flight was quite successful. (You can hear all about it here.)
It is surely no coincidence that Wells-Jensen’s research focusses on cognition across the cosmos, a form of astro-lingustics that models potential alien languages. She realized that in many of the traditional approaches had the assumption baked in that something like human visual perception was at the base of scientific development. As a blind person she was trying to model possibilities of alien technology that could make do without that mode.
I brought this up as a reminder to myself that there are always ways to stretch ourselves, to redefine what we too easily accept as limitations. I have no intention to ever visit a space station, mind you, but want to apply the principle of exploring alternatives that are open to me and might enrich my life.
And speaking of exploring alternatives in the context of extraterrestrial research, here is a fun bit on what astro-biologists are up to these days. They are looking, here in the Pacific Northwest no less, for clues about alien modes of intelligence by researching octopus minds. Yup. No kidding. On the most basic level, we humans have a centralized brain that is the control center of all that is perceived or enacted. But not so the octopus. Their “intelligence” is distributed, with most of their neurons placed in their arms and their suckers, basically each thinking for themselves. So how does octopus behavior get coordinated, with so many different control enters at work? That is what they are trying to find out, with the mindset that it’s not about how intelligent they are; it’s about how they are intelligent. Jupiter’s icy moons that are thought to have oceans underneath that ice. And if, say, they had hydrothermal vents, theoretically, they could support complex life. Octopi on Europa?
I tell you, – well, I tell myself – life doesn’t stop to be interesting, just because you can’t hike in New Mexico any longer! I will be like this: blossoming under difficult circumstances. We should all be.
