Yesterday I wrote about Hemlock, a poisonous plant that can kill. In the interest of fair and balanced reporting – and no, no false equivalencies here – I will today introduce a plant that heals, in ways just called for by our current times where war-like action by state and military forces start to dominate our streets, tear gassing peaceful protesters, if only to create photo-ops near churches.
The outside beauty of Borage, Borago officinalis L., is matched by the positive effects of the chemical properties contained inside. The leaves, flowers and seeds of the plant stimulate the adrenaline gland when ingested, helping to produce adrenaline which enables flight or fight responses in times of stress. In fact, Roman soldiers prepared themselves for battle by drinking Borage wine, claiming: “Ego borago gaudia semper ago” – I, Borage, will always bring courage. Both ancient Greeks and Romans also believed that it was useful as an anti-depressant, or, as they put it, cheer the heart and lift melancholia. Aren’t we in dire need of that? Courage and less sadness, so we can resume to act rather than feel paralyzed?
Liquid distilled from the leaves helps with the damage of steroid therapy (often use while fighting cancer,) alleviates dry coughs (lingering effects from Covid-19 infections,) and eases the effects of menstrual disorders. Borage poultices can help with inflamed skin and eczema.
Throughout the centuries, healers and now contemporary naturopathic practitioners all incorporated Borage into their arsenal of medicines. Eventually, science caught up: Borage is used by pharmacological industries as an antioxidant due to its bioactive compound content, called phenolics. These acids exert antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, and, as it turns out, anti-carcinogenic effects. Put simply, both wild and cultivated Borage provides chemical blueprints that can be used in the fight against cancer, infection and improve the immune-system.
And if that isn’t enough to lift your spirits, the plant also makes for one of the best sauces around – the traditional green sauce of the region around Frankfurt am Main. Here is the recipe. ( I assume it’s a sauce. Or is it gravy? Or dressing? How many more decades do I need to live here to figure out the difference? For once German is simple: it uses one word for all three! Soße.
And here’s the last bit of cheery news: Borage is quite effective to protect neighboring plants in your garden from pests and diseases. It attracts a lot of bees (as you can verify in the photographs) which also helps to pollinate your vegetable patch.
People have obviously always known it for its value – if you look at 17th century flemish paintings, for example, you find quite a lot of Borage blossoms mixed in with the other flowers that signify importance, either in terms of economic or religious value (tulips, lilies, carnations.) I am posting a few samples here but encourage those who love a good still life to check out the National Galleries’ recent exhibition. There is barely a flower painting that does not have Borage flowers peek through here or there.
Insects with Creeping Thistle and Borage Jan van Kessel the ElderBouquet in Clay Vase Jan Brueghel the Elder (Excerpt)
Flowers in a White Stone Vase, Dirck de Bray (Borage on the marble slab)
Bonus: here is a clip of how British florists recreated a Dutch masterpiece with real flowers, in huge dimensions, in honor of the exhibit.
And if you think we should not spend time with trifling issues like beauty while our country burns – I politely disagree. We need to preserve our sanity, keep our mental resources together, and that can only happen if we look at beautiful and hope-instilling things as well. That is how other generations survived far worse as well. Here is a reminder: Shostakovitch’s Symphony #11, commemorating the violent crushing of the 1905 uprising, Bloody Sunday, in Russia (and also hinting at the Hungarian Uprising in 1956.) (Music starts at 5:48)
Even for people like me who like being alone, at times even crave aloneness, the recent lonely days smear solitude with fear at times.
What if we all end up alone? Truly alone, not just the state that we currently experience, in our respective living conditions, geographic locations, separated from family and friends? The kind of alone where you lost the one closest to your heart, or take your last breath being surrounded by strangers, if surrounded at all?
I find comfort, when these threatening thoughts crop up, in thinking of a German scientist, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who conquered an immense loss when his wife-to-be suddenly died, by throwing himself into work and art. In fact, he confronted the pain of aloneness with creating a whole worldview of systemic connectedness – ecology – and devoted himself to promote Darwin’s theory of evolution. The fate of the individual, the very fact of individuation, could be subsumed into ideas of connectedness and dominant needs within and for the preservation of the species. He and Darwin became close friends, and cooperated on numerous scientific explorations.
Haeckel’s scientific methods as a zoologist and professor of comparative anatomy as well as his philosophy where not uncontroversial – to this day creationist websites call him Darwin’s lap dog and the German menace – his Tree of Life was and is incendiary to religious folks clinging to biblical literalness of creation. The Nazis, long after his death, selectively picked some of his writings on the political and religious implications of Darwinism to justify their racial programs, perhaps one of the reasons that he has fallen into obscurity more so than Darwin.
Within the scientific community some of Haeckel’s biological assumptions are no longer accepted. Inferring from his work with radiolarians, tiny plankton that is found in the ocean, he believed that an individual’s biological development mirrors the evolutionary one of the entire species – ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Not so.
He is heralded, though, as a brilliant naturalist and discoverer of multiple new species.
Whatever you think of his science, or his beliefs, there is no controversy around the fact that he was an amazing artist.
In fact, it was his art that introduced him to Darwin in the first place when he sent him portfolios with his drawings of jelly fish and other maritime creatures. The drawings in Kunstformen der Natur – Art Forms in Nature – are breathtaking, you can judge for yourself, of course.
I can vividly imagine how the painstaking creation of these detailed drawings and watercolors of jelly fish and other creatures distracted him from his loss; the embrace of a theory that celebrates interconnectedness in nature must have helped to transmute his grief into a sense of belonging. We should all be so lucky to find appropriate distractions and beliefs ourselves.
Or we could engage in truly downward comparison to make us feel better if we are really desperate: over dinner, the time of day where we try to cheer each other up by reporting useless factoids, I learned that marine biologists discovered, deep, deep at the floor of the ocean, a species of octopus that has to sit on her eggs (all 155 of them) for a gestation period of 4.5 years. Not eating during all this time, not moving once other than fending off ravenous crabs, the emaciated Mama dies when the little ones emerge. Now there is loneliness. To the bitter end.
Below is a 4 minute art film that uses Haeckel’s concepts and drawings to explain some of the things I mentioned. Nothing but wonder.
Music today fits the topic, I think. Anything and everything is captured in this concerto, from lonely distance, listlessness, determination to intense joy (Hindemith wrote it while still in the killing fields of WW I – art transmuting fear here as well.)
Photographs are of jelly fish at diverse aquariums, in Newport, OR, Vancouver BC and Charleston, SC.
Every so often there is a scientific article that should be read and shared for the title alone. I mean, how can you not revel in the image of your head consisting of layer after tear-producing layer enshrouding a lizard?
The one in question, a paper by scientists Joseph Cesario, David J. Johnson, and Heather L. Eisthen at Michigan State University, should be read for a more important insight, though. Not only do many of us, influenced by thinkers as long ago as the Greek philosophers, or as influential as Freud in our own times, conceive of our brain in ways that are wrong, but the majority of psychology textbooks, never mind common literature, perpetuate the false beliefs.
Put simply: we cling to the notion that there is an old reptilian part of the brain, that controls basic functions. Layered onto it is the limbicsystem that controls our emotional responses. On top of it is another layer, the cerebral cortex, which controls language, reasoning and rational actions. The tug of war between emotional reactions (hot) and deliberate reason (cold) is assigned to these regions and reserved for the evolutionary most complex species.
This notion includes some basic assumptions: that there are older anatomical structures (the animalistic drive center that only allows reflexive responses) and that there are newer structures that are reserved for more complex organism like humans, allowing for rational decision making, overriding the emotional response. They are seen as layered on top of each other, like geological strata that you can identify when you dig ever deeper onto the earth. And the notion assumes that we have evolved linearly from simple animals to highly complex ones, our own species included at the very top.
We’ll have to let go of this view. For one, neural and anatomical complexity evolved repeatedly within many independent lineages. Simply put, there is increasing complexity to be found in mammals and non-mammal species, octopus, sharks, birds for example show ever evolving incredible brain complexity and corresponding behavior.
The notion of layers of new structures added to existing structures across evolutionary time as species became more “complex” is also incorrect. All mammals, not just humans, have a pre-frontal cortex the part that controls reasoning, it is not uniquely human.
Most importantly, evolution does not proceed by laying down geological strata, one over the other, instead evolution changes existing parts, transforming them. That does not mean that everything earlier is completely wiped out (the “head vs. heart” tug of war is something we do still experience) but the belief that emotion and reason are located in evolutionary independent, untouched structures is scientifically untenable.
The paper goes on to discuss why it matters to change our mistaken views. I’ll leave it to you to read up on it if that is of interest. I will cheer us up in the short run with something related that I read yesterday referring to science, by Jan Mieszkowski, a Reed College professor in the German department:
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Lizards come in all sizes – one of the biggest is the green iguana. Iguanas are a favorite American pet, and all too often released into the wild after people get bored – there they wreck havoc. Florida, where today’s photographs were taken some time back, suffers substantial damage from these creatures who have not many natural predators, proliferate and threaten eco system and structures, river banks and golf courses alike. The video below is pretty graphic in what iguana hunters do, catching the lizards for kill, or to be sold to restaurants (their meat is a favorite for caribbean cuisine, “tree chicken,”) or to be sold for pets. It is an interesting sociological snapshot, though, which is why I decided to include it.
And here is the biggest lizzard of them all in a wonderful 1924 Fritz Lang rendition….of a Wagnerian Tarzan slaying the dragon.
Bullypulpit here. Essential reading. Sweetened by the sweetest birds, I believe Wilson warblers, photographed from my window during their fleeting, skipping, hopping, fluttering visit on Saturday. Tired of birds yet? Tired of politics of racism? Granting the former, but we don’t have the luxury of fatigue for the latter. As I said, bullypulpit today.
In a friendlier, pleading voice: please read this short essay by Ibram X. Kendi. It is enlightening, non-belligerent, and so, so timely. (Alternatively, I put the key paragraphs below to get the message in plain view.)
In a nutshell he argues that we see parallels between the American history of slaveholding mentality and the division in approaches to containing the Covid-19 pandemic today. Embedded in some plain teaching about historical facts of our founding fathers and the Civil War is this core insight:
Slaveholders desired a state that wholly secured their individual freedom to enslave, not to mention their freedom to disenfranchise, to exploit, to impoverish, to demean, and to silence and kill the demeaned. The freedom to. The freedom to harm. Which is to say, in coronavirus terms, the freedom to infect.
Slaveholders disavowed a state that secured any form of communal freedom—the freedom of the community from slavery, from disenfranchisement, from exploitation, from poverty, from all the demeaning and silencing and killing. The freedom from. The freedom from harm. Which is to say, in coronavirus terms, the freedom from infection.
From the beginning of the American project, the powerful individual has been battling for his constitutional freedom to harm, and the vulnerable community has been battling for its constitutional freedom from harm. Both freedoms were inscribed into the U.S. Constitution, into the American psyche. The history of the United States, the history of Americans, is the history of reconciling the unreconcilable: individual freedom and community freedom. There is no way to reconcile the enduring psyche of the slaveholder with the enduring psyche of the enslaved.
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Much has been written about the origins of individualism, the settler mentality, the connection to the belief in the doctrine of exceptionalism and the fact that it is a specifically Western value, so different from the rest of the world which cherishes communal values.
Here is another take that I found quite interesting. New research published six months ago explores a connection between the teachings of the Catholic Church and the rise of individualism, including its specific beliefs in independence, agency and autonomy, starting in the 6th century. In essence there was a church directive to cease intrafamily marriages – to stop marrying your cousins, eventually up to the 6th degree (so not just an incest taboo,) or their widows or adopt their orphans, which changed the traits shared by most people in the world to something different, individualistic, specifically Western.
The research used an enormous range of data to look at correlations between time and intensity spent under the directions of the church, and development of these Western values, including comparisons within one and the same country (Italy) that provided two parts differentially dependent on the church, the industrial North and the poor South. The data “included historical records of church exposure in every nation on Earth, beginning in the first century and ending in 1500 C.E., when European society had become nearly fully Christianized. They also looked at they consulted anthropological data to assign a kinship intensity score to each of the world’s major ethnolinguistic groups. This score was based on historical rates of cousin marriage, polygamy, and other factors. Finally, they drew on dozens of studies that used established psychological measures such as the World Values Survey to determine modern population-level scores for traits such as individualism, creativity, nonconformity, obedience, and ingroup/outgroup trust.”
The large family clans that had been constituted by these family connections guaranteed survival. Growing crops and protecting land required cooperation, and marrying cousins was an easy way to get it. When these kinship systems were broken apart it had enormous consequences, not all good. On the one hand, less dependency and obedience to clans, elders, community did lead to more freedom of choice for the individual, less forced obedience and conformity. Individualistic people working together across family boundaries (and thus with less in-group conformity) formed a precursor civic society that eventually enabled democracy.
The disruption of extended family systems in favor of a nuclear family, however, also meant less security in case of emergencies, famine, disease, with no familial system to fall back on. This is where the church jumped in, corralling the poor in their alms/work houses. Depriving folks of the leadership of their elders left space for the church to take over as authority, requiring obedience, extending influence. The disruption of family ties also led to less land consolidation among the intermarried, from which the church benefited by snatching it up for itself. This was particularly the case during the demise of entire family branches when the lack of succession through adoption was blocked and the estates fell by default to the church.
And, of course, the prime value that we eventually put on individualism weakened the values attached to communal existence.
The interconnection between human psychology, religion, economy and politics never ceases to amaze me. As does our willingness to ignore history and look away from causal factors – like the ongoing effects of slavery or the disadvantages of individualistic societal structuring – when we try to move towards solutions in crises. The worst thing, though, is the fact that so often the price for acting in our self-interest is paid by others, the masses who are granted neither: the freedom for or the freedom from.
And here is freedom-related music – in an old but still unmatched version by Otto Klemperer:
And here is to someone who saw it all early and clearly: Happy 202nd birthday, dear Karl.
TRIER, GERMANY – MAY 05: Some of the 500, one meter tall statues of German political thinker Karl Marx on display on May 5, 2013 in Trier, Germany. The statues, created by artist Ottmar Hoerl, are part of an exhibition at the Museum Simeonstift Trier commemorating the 130th anniversary of the death of Marx in 1883. Marx, who was born in Trier, is the author of The Communist Manifesto, and his ideas on the relationship between labour, industry and capital created the ideological foundation for socialist and communist movements across the globe. (Photo by Hannelore Foerster/Getty Images)
Today’s title is not referring to the kind of activity intended to make you buy clothes. Instead I want to talk about representations trying to make you understand and/or buy into complex concepts. Think this is going to be boring? Think again! It provides a glimpse of science and will all relate to art. It will also be long. And personal. Consider it your reward, dear brave and zany readers, or punishment. Your pick.
Friderike Heuer Moonlight (2020)
My artist talk for my new montage series, now on exhibition at the Newport Visual Arts Center until April 25, was shut down because of sensible enforcement of social distancing in our coronavirus world. I figured I’ll write about the work instead (in more depth than a 10 minute presentation) and want to give credit to a brilliant short essay I read some years back that influenced my thinking. The author, philosopher James Nguyen, explained in ways even we lesser mortals can understand – he ain’t one of us, just check his education and employment history, we will hear more from this young man – how we can get a grip on complex, complicated issues by finding models that explain them in simpler ways. “All” it takes is a bit of creativity in coming up with the right model and play with it.
Friderike Heuer On the Town (2020)
As an example he used the complex issue of figuring out how fake news spread in our societies and applied a model derived from epidemiology (a full three years, by the way, before we all tuned into that field in our desire to understand the spread of the coronavirus.) You can think of the dispersion of fake news as a virus that is infecting the population and apply to it medical models that track how diseases spread, for example the susceptible, infected, recovered (SIR) model, to reinterpret it. The people who buy into fake news are infected, the ones who now ignore it are immune (recovered) and then there are the masses who are susceptible to it. The SIR model predicts that we can modulate the spread by lowering the proportion of people who are susceptible, slowing down the rate or speed with which the news/virus is dispersed, and increase the rate at which those who started to believe the news/got sick now recover. The right proportion of these three factors (low, low, high) will lead to herd immunity, helping us to tackle an epidemic.
Nguyen points out that just as this scientific approach aims to represent a target, artists attempt to represent a subject. Reasoning about and constructing representations helps us to grasp new perspectives and to learn about the world. “In this sense art and science share a common core; the human ability to construct and interact with representations in order to learn about what it is that they represent.”
Friderike Heuer The Cranes (2020)
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Fast forward to last summer when I visited the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts for the first time. It is a terrific institution, providing tons of sensory experience (walk through the replica of a whale’s heart; board a whaling ship built to scale with every last detail), lots of education about the economics, politics and environmental issues historically associated with the whaling trade, and enticing exhibits of scrimshaw and macramé crafts, tools and weapons used during the expeditions. The museum offers replicas of the living quarters of those who benefitted from the the craze for oil derived from the blubber of whales, oil that burnt bright and without scent or smoke, and the craze for whale bones used in corsets confining women to their breathless, suffocating place. There is also plenty of information about the cruel fate of those doing the actual labor, and dying in the pursuit of profit for their masters. (I wrote about my first visit here.)
The visual art gallery in the museum exhibited some 20 or so paintings, titled The Wind is Op – Climate, Culture and Innovation in Dutch Maritime Paintings, by Dutch and Flemish Old Masters from their impressive collection. The maritime paintings and drawings from the 1500s to the 19th century differed in quality, from masterworks to “school of so and so… ” They shared, though, a clear expression of pride and admiration for the explorers, sailors and skill of the seafarers in their midst. The paintings celebrate the heroic and are in awe of maritime prowess and domination of the beasts.
Friderike Heuer Arctic Still Life (2020)
They also provided testimony for the effects of climate change then: The ‘Little Ice Age’ between 1500 and 1600 greatly affected the character of Dutch whaling in the seventeenth century. The harsh cold that froze rivers and canals changed ocean currents, which impacted trade routes to Asia and America. It also stranded many a sperm whale on Dutch beaches, caught by shallow water, providing increased fascination with the giants for the population. The Dutch were particularly innovative in coping with these climate challenges. They built differently shaped ships adapted to arctic waters, learned to hunt from the shores and found ways to process the blubber either on ships or on shore for efficient transport in barrels sailing towards the Dutch ports.
It struck me then and there that for centuries people were not realizing what the unconstrained killing of whales would do to the species. They were aware that hunting grounds emptied out and they had to venture farther afield, but they possibly ascribed it to the experienced change in temperatures. The scientific knowledge of the possibility of extinction of a species due to overfishing (and the subsequent trickle-down effects) was not available.
Friderike Heuer Hamburg Harbor (2020)
WE, on the other hand, DO know what harms our oceans, and what needs to be done to protect those ecosystems. After all, when 2 million whales were killed in the 20thcentury in the Southern oceans alone, many countries came together to sign the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling and establish a global body to manage whaling, the International Whaling Commission (IWC.) Its role has grown to tackle conservation issues including bycatch and entanglement, sustainable whale watching, ocean noise, pollution and debris, collisions between whales and ships as climate change impacts migration routes and global warming affects available food sources.
Friderike Heuer Plastics (2020)
Yet several countries have recently left the organization to take up whaling again, with potentially dire consequences. On a larger scale, all of us, as consumers of plastics and other pollutants that end up in the waters, endanger existing whale populations. In our relentless addiction to the amenities provided by fossil fuel consumption, furthermore, we do little to mitigate climate change that affects maritime biological systems, with feedback loops into weather systems, with feedback loops, for that matter, into how disease spreads and creates pandemics.
Friderike Heuer The Heron (2020)
Clearly we are not heeding the warnings coming from the experts, just like the people of Nineveh, in biblical times, did not open their arms to a – reluctant to begin with – prophet named Jonah, the very one supposed to have been swallowed by a whale. Postcards from Nineveh, then, is the title of my exhibit, riffing on what my work is trying to represent as a reminder of a complex problem – sometimes naive, sometimes willful ignorance affecting environmental protection.
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So how do you represent the dangers of inaction? For one, you can point to a subject where practically everyone knows how horribly things can go and have gone wrong: people are aware of what has happened to whales. Limitless pursuit of fishing for profit brought several whale species to the brink of extinction across the centuries. Some are still fighting for their survival, like the North Atlantic right whale, others, like the grey whale, are now recovering due to organized intervention. This purpose was served by using excerpts from all the New Bedford whaling art that I photographed, mostly taking snippets with my iPhone. Here is a better example from the museum’s website.
Parts of this painting were used in the montage The Cranes above and Stranded (1) below.
Secondly, you have to represent what is at risk. For me nothing spells that out better than looking at the beauty of nature as we know it, with the implication how it can and will be lost if we don’t change course. The landscapes and seascapes from my photographs originate predominantly in the Pacific Northwest, along the Washington side of the Columbia river and the Oregon coast. There are also nature images from New Mexico, and Germany. Weaving the two elements together, what we know of the past (whaling disaster) and know as the present (the gift that is our landscape, still mostly intact) represents the intersection of human behavior, driven by either lack of knowledge or unwillingness to convert what we know into action.
Friderike Heuer Stranded (2) (2020)
Thirdly, who will be our prophet given the tendency to minimize scientific input either through absence of science education or willful dissing and curtailing of the discipline? Art has to step in and alert us to the issues, and perhaps help persuade us to engage. This aspect is represented by my photographs of art institutions and art, taken across the last decade, from the art museum in my hometown of Hamburg, Germany, Kunsthaus Wien, Museum Hundertwasser, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Tacoma Glass Museum, the Philharmonic Concert hall in Los Angeles, the National Museum in Kraków, to the exhibition halls of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISDY) and Montreal’s Arsenal Gallery which resides in a converted shipyard and TOHU, the circus arts organization.
Friderike Heuer Hamburger Kunsthalle (2020)Friderike Heuer Waiting (2020) (Barnes Foundation)Friderike Heuer The Starlings (2020) (Tacoma Museum of Glass, Bridge Sculpture)Friderike Heuer Pacific Sights (2020) (LA Philharmonic Hall)Friderike Heuer The Mirror (2020) (RISDY, the slats reminded me of the corsets)Friderike Heuer Still Life with Sea Shell (2020) (Arsenal Gallery Montreal)
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Good photographers introduce us to their vision of what is in front of our eyes. The way they represent something is by means of selecting a specific perspective, capturing a certain mood, structuring their composition – in the end, though, they depict. Photographs show a world that exists, however subjectively perceived.
Photomontages, on the other hand, convey something that is constructed, giving the artist the leeway to represent possibilities, anomalies, products of imagination, just like painters do. By combining, manipulating, and altering photographs they create something that cannot be found in reality and yet conveys a sense of alternate reality, of imagined recourse. The way they come about in my own case is not me sitting with a checklist of the aspects of the model discussed above in front of my computer program that helps me create these works. I am loosely guided by the original thoughts about representation, and use only things I photographed myself, but the rest unfolds organically and often in ways that surprise myself.
Take, for example, this image, Reminiscence, an invitation to look at the past.
Friderike Heuer, Reminiscence (2020)
The Dutch landscape, painted centuries ago, is one I saw every summer as a child. I lived in Holland for a year as a young child, and then for a decade at the German side of the border with Holland, and our summers were spent at the North Sea, with boats like the old ones depicted still occasionally appearing in the seascape of the 1950s. The figure is a self portrait of a Finnish photographer I greatly admire, Eliana Brotherus. I photographed her work in Vienna, 2 years ago. She herself linked to the past in her portrait series by appropriating the landscape, stance and coat of Caspar David Friedrich, a German painter of the romantic period, and she reminded me of pictures of myself when still young. I intended to make the figure transparent to represent how the past seeps through into the present, guiding us forwards or holding us back, who knows. When I looked at the image, though, all it reminded me of was how thin skinned I am – both porous for the onslaught of information that I seek every day, visually and otherwise, but also for absorbing the emotional currents around me, strained and otherwise, often forcing me to withdraw. It bubbled up into the montage, unintended.
Or, as a different example, several of the montages ended up representing some aspects of colonial invasion of this continent, not necessarily tied to whaling but to maritime prowess that led to the endangering or extinction related to our own species, the humans, ways of life and languages of First Nations.
Friderike Heuer Confluence (2020) (Columbia River Channel)Friderike Heuer Stranded (1) (2020) (New Mexico at Kasha-Katuwe National Monument)
One thing I was certain about, though, was that I did not want to lecture with a sledgehammer. I picked a rather small format for the montages, so they don’t overwhelm, but beckon for intimate interaction, inviting the viewer to come close to see the details. I wanted to give the Dutch and Flemish painters of yore a platform to celebrate their artistic achievements and importance to our understanding of history. And I wanted my own work to be beautiful to reach people’s minds, more so than disquieting, although I seem to be unable to avoid the latter completely regardless of what topic I tackle.
Friderike Heuer The Wish (2020)
Now all we need is someone to review the work to see if it actually accomplishes what I set out to do: to remind us that we cannot simply interfere with nature without consequences, or keep up our behavior blind to what is required to protect what we love. Send me a postcard!
PS: True gratitude to my fellow photographers and friends Ken Hochfeld, who printed and framed and critiqued everything you see here, and Dale Schreiner who helped me to sequence the series – his habitual role in all of my exhibitions. A thank you also to Tom Webb who runs the VAC in Newport and invited me to show and hung it in the upstairs gallery. And a shoutout to Steve and Barbara Blair who photographed the work during a visit this weekend – I still have not seen it in real life in the gallery!
In 1993, Cornell University historian of science Margaret W. Rossiter published a paper that evaluated systematic, sex-based bias against women scientists and their work both in a historical and a contemporary context. She named that bias the Matilda effect aftersuffragist and feminist critic Matilda J. Gage of New York, who in the late nineteenth century both experienced and articulated this phenomenon. Both the historian and her subject are fascinating personalities, but I want to concentrate on Rossiter’s work here, because it provided a lot of stimulation for social psychology research that has confirmed her notions in experimental settings of gender bias and science. (My source is a terrific essay in the Smithsonian from last year.)
Rossiter was one of the few female grad students in History of Science at Yale in the 1960s and wondered why no-one would ever teach about female scientists, Marie Curie excepted. Her curiosity set her on a path devoted for all of her professional life, to excavate all those women scientists who had been relegated to the dustbin or excluded or simply stricken from the record. Equally important, she investigated the mechanisms by which male domination in STEM fields continues to flourish.
Her three books (the first published in 1982) on the topic began with this introduction: “It is important to note early that women’s historically subordinate ‘place,’ in science (and thus their invisibility to even experienced historians of science) was not a coincidence and was not due to any lack of merit on their part. It was due to the camouflage intentionally placed over their presence in science.” (Here is the most recent volume:Women Scientists in America: Forging a New World since 1972.)
Her work emphasized that women CAN do the work by providing countless examples of what women had accomplished; her writings eventually led to a program by the National Science Foundation funding efforts to increase “the representation and advancement of women in engineering and academic science degrees.” She also showed how often male scientists either received or more often took credit for the work done by their female colleagues. Misplaced credit has had enormous consequences, both for the betrayed women but also for STEM fields as a whole who underestimate, curb or exclude the potential contributions by scientists not male.
One of the things not considered by Rossiter in her decades of writing and research is the role played by sexual harassment in the STEM fields. Her archival sources used to stitch together the picture of women in science across the centuries were simply mute on that point. We do, however, have more information for our own time: A year and a half ago the National Academy of Science published a book with stunning statistics (Sexual Harassment of Women Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine(2018.) Here are some of the numbers:
-Women in STEM endure the highest rate of sexual harassment of any profession outside of the military. – Nearly 50 percent of women in science, and 58 percent of women in academia, report experiencing sexual harassment, including 43 percent of female STEM graduate students. – 90 percent of women who report sexual misconduct experience retaliation.
No wonder then that so many drop out of the programs altogether.
What fascinates me is the effect that a singular curiosity – first Gage’s then Rossiter’s preoccupation with the disappeared women scientists – can lead to a real shift in how a society approaches a subject. Whether it is NSF funding, or social science research, or simply writers who start being hooked on the topic and investigate themselves – our view is changed forever and to the better. And speaking of writers, here is a fun book with portraits of women scientists – the link leads you to two of the 52 short biographies presented:
Music is also nifty today: Kronos Quartet’s cellist Jeffrey Zeigler performs works of 8 contemporary composers who created a piece related to a specific scientist. The full album can be found on Spotify – Sounds of Science (Jeffrey Zeigler.) Here is one track. And another (by Yuka C. Honda, composing for NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson who died in January. And another (Felipe Pérez Santiago composing for Jill Tarter, an American astronomer looking for extraterrestrial life.)
Photographs of diverse works at the Venice Biennale 2015.
And in the let’s see how can we rescue the mood for the weekend – department, here is a glimmer of hope for locus-infested Pakistan: 100 000 ducks. Courtesy of China, no less.
Locusts had three uninterrupted exceptional breeding cycles due to the 2018/19 cyclone season that brought deluges to the Arab peninsula. They are now swarming into East Africa and South Asia, threatening already scarce food supplies and leading to states of emergency.
Sending hungry fowl is not new – in 2000, a 700,000-strong army of ducks and chickens was used to gain control over swarms of locusts that devoured over 3.8 million hectares of crops and grassland. As it turns out, ducks were more efficient than chickens at guzzling down the devastating pests, they stayed in group and did not disappear randomly into the landscape like their little headless friends…
So: 100,000 ducks are awaiting deployment along some 3,000 miles from the eastern province of Zhejiang to Pakistan, which shares a border with the Xinjiang province.
Quack. Quack. Let’s hope they have insatiable appetites.
Musical topic today is not for the faint of heart but for those who want to faint from laughing. The larger than life persona behind The Homosexual Necrophilica Duck Opera is duck guy Kees Moeliker, Director of the Museum for Natural History Rotterdam. He won the Ig Nobel Prize in 2003 for his paper of the same name as the opera. The video has him introduce the work and then presents the miniature opera.
Let no-one ever accuse me of not trying to widen our horizons, musical and otherwise….
Add a third person to the list of those actually managing to make me reluctantly listen to podcasts – next to my Beloved and my son, I now owe some gratitude to Gordon Caron, a dear friend who yesterday sent a link to an NPR program, HUMANKIND.
Houck’s central focus, other than acknowledging and preparing for climate change, concerns the integration of natural spaces into built environments, cities and the like. He feels strongly that we should not just preserve the pristine wild, a priority of so many other environmental organizations, but ensure immediate encounters with nature on a daily basis. Providing easy access, in other words, to nature where people live, whether it is San Francisco, LA, Chicago or Portland, every day, not just on vacation. “How can a child care for the survival of the condor, if s/he has never known a wren,” is something he cites in the conversation with Humankind’s broadcaster, Freudberg.
He urges that we need to protect urban green spaces and (re)build them, including metropolitan wildlife preserves. It will make people engage in nature, come to love and thus protect it, reap health benefits and even financial advantages, since property close to natural areas are increasing in value. Indirectly that protects rural and more pristine areas as well, because people will reside in livable cities and not expand beyond the urban growth boundary, parceling up the country side (and using the car to drive to work….)
One of the urban nature preserves he is keen on is Oaks Bottom, my regular Tuesday haunt as readers of this blog (particularly those who I cherish as my coffeecup coven) are well aware of. (iPhone photographs are from yesterday! Original introduction here.) The 160 acre wetland was filled with rubble from building the freeway and once used as a landfill.
Black cottonwood and ash forest only partially obstruct the view to the downtown skyline. Yesterday I saw a bald eagle (there is a pair nesting close by)
a barred owl (!)
and once again the little kingfisher from last week, although too far away to get in view with the phone in one hand, an impatient leashed pointer on the other…
S/he is on top of the stick jutting out on top from the pile.
In the podcast you hear Houck’s voice get all excited when he reports, live, all the kinds of critters he is seeing. Map that marveling onto my face, and you got me pinned Tuesday mornings. The podcast is worth a listen.
So is today’s music: Schumann’s Wald Szenen (Forest Scenes.) I chose not the perennial version by Richter, but a faster one by Kadouch. If you ignore his theatrics, it’s really a lovely interpretation. Just close your eyes.
Happy sloths. Happy storks. Happy Cows. Unhappy whales. At least some of them. (And yes, you only get the jokes if you regularly read the blog when it resorts to the to be continued mode….)
This week was devoted to looking more closely at nature and in particular at migration. Whales, of course, are among the most familiar species doing an annual trek, and we would be remiss not to mention some of the scientific findings around their existence. (I wrote a bit about them last year here.)
So why describe them as unhappy? Well, several of their kind are severely endangered, and not just because the whale oil industry of yore pursued them to the brink of extinction.
Take right wales, for example, who once roamed the Atlantic and whose numbers are dwindling. In the last 10 years the number of calves born to them have dropped tremendously. And when a calf is born it rests for some 5 months with the mother at the ocean’s surface – completely at risk to be stricken by shipping vessels, or caught in fishing gear. Mariners cannot detect them with listening devices, to avoid collisions, because the instinctual behavior is NOT to make sounds, to avoid natural predators. Between declining fertility and rising accident mortality, they are at risk of extinction. Only 400-500 of them remain in the Atlantic and fewer than 100 in the Pacific.
Sei whales? Endangered. Blue whales? Endangered. Sperm and fin whales? Vulnerable. Any tidbits that can distract us from getting too depressed by these facts? The tongue of a blue whale alone is equivalent to the weight of an elephant! They migrate from the polar and subarctic regions in summer to the tropical and subtropical waters in winter, some of them are over 150 years old – which means they actually were alive during commercial whaling times and might remember being hunted by whalers. Autopsies on dead sperm whales revealed up to 65 pounds of plastic in their stomachs, leading to blockage and causing lethal peritonitis. Ok, not helping with the depression, is it.
I can do better. Humpback whales are thriving after coming close to extinction! Scientists stress the role of proper management for the recovery (details here) but also warn that the food for which whales and so many other marine animals compete, namely Krill, is strongly affected by global warming, getting increasingly scarce. If more whales feed on it, there’s less to go around for the ones lower in the food chain….
Ok, I give up. All these facts are part of why I currently have turned to working on an art series that uses (partial) 17th century dutch paintings of traditional whaling expeditions, combined with my photographs of contemporary Northwest landscapes and birds, as an example of the consequences of ruthless environmental exploitation to both nature and humankind. Today’s images are the latest examples in that endeavor, I had, after all, promised some art as well.
And here is a tone poem by Alan Hovhaness performed by the Seattle symphony.
Yesterday I introduced the happy sloths of Panama. Today, let’s turn to happy cows. Doing whatever cows do in the Bavarian country side, they were unperturbed when a flock of large, strange white birds descended, alit on their backs and began nit-picking bovine fleece. Maybe there is something stronger than alkaloid compounds in the Bavarian water. In any case, it was enough of a strange sight that a young birder-in-training rushed to the relevant experts trying to find out what on earth had just happened.
It was a flock of unfamiliar cattle egrets who had made a wrong turn during their migration.
Some decades later, our observant youngster Martin Wikelski has become the director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany, after teaching stints that included years at Princeton. He is still interested in birds, and now in general migration patterns as indicators of disease spread, disaster detection, and global change. He is spearheading ICARUS, (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) a program connected to the International Space Station as a tracking site for interacting animal migrations, installed last summer. (Equally impressive, in my book, is of course the fact that this guy lists adventurer in first place on his CV, scientific grandeur notwithstanding.)
He stuck with birds, but cows have not disappeared either. They are currently part of a research program that has fitted sensor-studded radio transmitters in quake-prone regions around the world to various birds and mammals, trying to pick up earthquake warnings from changes in the animals behavior and physiology (a controversial project, one might add, with geologists not convinced that animal behavior changes around the timing of an earth quake. But that will be obviously explored now.)
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What do we know about migration, though? Take one short minute and check out this video, which shows you the flow of movement across the globe. It is astounding.
We know that they move and where they move, at least for some of the species. We do not quite understand why they move such huge distances and, when finding a place that is perfectly suited, regularly leave it nonetheless to make the long trek back home. Home being not just a general area, but a specific tree in a specific forest, a distinct chimney, church tower or other nesting sites. Sometimes the specificity is encoded across generations, so that some butterflies return to exact places where their great-grand parents came from, not more immediate forbears.
We know that migration serves not just the migratory animal populations, but others along their routes, who feed on the carcasses of those who didn’t make it, or live on lands fertilized by the droppings, or cleared of pests, insects that are devoured by the birds in flight (swallows, or more precisely, swifts, fly for six months (!) non-stop, and are eating insects en route and apparently sleeping while flying as well…)
We cannot yet explain why migration happens to such far away places as the Amazon, when Ft. Lauderdale is just around the corner, equally warm and comfy, say… and why distances increased across the millennia. And in particular we have not yet figured out why on average each species follows its particular migratory routes, but then there are always outliers, who do not comform.
Leave it to our intrepid ecologist and adventurer to follow exactly these non-conforming individuals, trying to figure out if it was disease that stopped them, or external forces or something else altogether. Pursuing a stork he had named Hansi, he jets to Turkey, awaits once-daily radio transmissions to narrow the distance to the subject, and eventually finds Hansi perfectly happy and healthy gorging on frogs in some field near the Syrian border.
The hypothesis is that natural selection programs some section of the progeny to wander farther afield. That innovative individual will be important for the species to thrive, to survive when aggregate flows are threatened by disaster, by pathogens, or by obstacles put in their way by human activities. (This reminds me of a nasty fight going on between two factions of German environmentalists right now. Some want to erect wind turbines to curb carbon emissions, others fight against them to protect wetlands and birds. The laughing third is of course the oil and coal industry.)
We’ll see what the research data will reveal. In the meantime I decided to pull some hang-gliding photographs from the archives in Wikelski’s honor. He reports that he has become an avid hang glider in order to explore how it must feel to be a bird (his words.) Well, he won’t be up there for 6 months at a time…… and I also hope he is never the parent of a kid who does this – cost me many an anxious moment in my lifetime. Then again, it also took me on some pretty spectacular hikes, like the one shown here at Silverstar Mt.,WA.
