Byline: Katie Alvord

Chasing Swans

2011-04-11T19:28:00.004-04:00

This is a second edited excerpt from the talk I give in January this year, “Writing Outside: Crafting Prose In and About Nature,” presented at Finlandia University for the Writers on Location seminar series. I posted a first excerpt, Waiting for Eagles, last month.

My 1990 trip to Klamath Basin with photographer Don Jackson turned out to be unforgettable. We spent our first day waiting for bald eagles in a freezing-cold bird blind above Tule Lake. Despite the miserable cold, the day ended well after several close encounters with eagles flying close enough that we could hear their wingstrokes. Some landed just a few feet away from us.

The next day we went to Lower Klamath Wildlife Refuge, right next to Tule Lake, and traveled its auto-tour routes, designated roads on levees around wetlands within the Klamath Basin's refuges. These wetlands provide habitat for huge numbers of waterfowl as well as attracting raptors on the hunt. To get good shots on the auto-tour routes, Don asked me to drive his van while he stayed ready with his cameras and long lenses, scanning the territory for good shots.

My role as driver involved a lot of quick driving reflexes. As we cruised past the huge flooded fields filled with ducks and geese and herons with hawks and eagles off to the sides watching for prey, Don was continuously (it seemed to me) getting very excited about various birds he was seeing and calling out instructions: "Speed up! Slow down! Stop here!” If you're a birder or a photographer you might know this drill. A few times we did park the van and just sat watching. As Don scanned for good images, I scribbled notes about some of our experiences. Here is an edited selection from these notes.

Up on the right, two tundra swans hear us coming. The noise of the van startles them into a pre-flight waddle. They spread their wings, bodies moving rapidly back and forth, and flapping awkwardly, they lift off the ground. In flight, though, awkwardness drops away. The gawky teenagers become graceful dancers, wings and bodies tracing rhythmic patterns through the air as we give chase.

I'm driving the van. Don rides in the back, surrounded by cameras and lenses. The swans fly right alongside the road, above the irrigation canal to our right. At first they are ahead of us; keeping them in sight, I accelerate to catch them.

"Go on! Go on!" Don urges me as he sets up his camera gear, lens aimed out the window. I speed up again; now I must be going 20, 25, maybe 30 mph on the sloshy road. I lose sight of the birds as the van overtakes them. It's all right, though, because Don has them in his sights and I hear the shutter click and click again. For a few minutes he loses them, as the swans traverse a graceful diagonal in front of the van, bodies lifting slightly with every wingstroke. They cross the road and fly along our left flank. But then, cooperatively, they fly back to the right again and parallel to the road, just in front of the camera lens.

The van rattles as we give chase, sliding back and forth a bit on the snow and ice and crusty mud. We hope that somehow it will be steady enough. Don is shooting at 1/1000th of a second, trying to compensate for the van's bounce and vibration as well as to freeze the motion of the birds. I hear the shutter click again and again; we give chase for another 200 yards before our road curves off to the left and the swans veer off in the other direction. We slow down, stop and watch as their pale silhouettes disappear into the backdrop of snow-covered mountains and patchy gray-clouded afternoon skies.

Photo copyright Don Jackson and used courtesy of Don Jackson Photography. For more of Don's award-winning photography, visit www.donjackson.com. Don also produces green banners -- high-quality banners and signs made from earth-friendly materials, for events and more.

Waiting for Eagles

2011-03-01T13:19:00.010-05:00

In January this year, I gave a talk called "Writing Outside: Crafting Prose In and About Nature" to kick off the Writers On Location seminar series at Finlandia University. This post is an edited excerpt from that talk.

Back in 1990, I paired up with nature photographer Don Jackson to do an outdoor story about Klamath Basin. The basin straddles the Oregon-California border and includes six different wildlife refuges as well as numerous lakes and wetlands within its borders. It’s an internationally famous birding spot along the Pacific Flyway, visited by large flocks of migratory waterfowl during spring and fall migrations. Klamath Basin also supports the largest overwintering population of bald eagles in the lower 48 states, usually with hundreds -- and some winters more than 1,000 -- eagles counted at peak.

As a photographer with an affinity for birds, Don Jackson is someone who loves Klamath Basin. When we became friends and he learned I was a writer, he suggested we team up to do an article about the area’s overwintering eagles.

I had never been to Klamath Basin, but Don talked so enthusiastically about it I was keen to go. We decided to drive up in his van – about a five-hour trip from where we both lived at that time, in Santa Rosa, California. He'd haul along his camera gear, I'd take notebooks, and we’d stalk eagles with lens and pens.

To get close-ups of eagles, Don wanted to use one of the bird blinds maintained by the refuges for photographers. Using this blind meant getting up early enough to hike for an hour up a steep rocky ridge to get ourselves hidden before eagles started flying up-basin at dawn. Once in the blind, we would have to sit quietly for hours in freezing weather and cramped quarters, hoping for eagles to show. This image shows the view from the blind.

The experience promised to be miserable – but also, we hoped, unforgettable. My job was to capture in words why someone else might want to do this, since ultimately we aimed to sell a travel article to our regional newspaper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. I spent my time up on the ridge scribbling the following impressions as we waited for eagles.

My toes have never felt so numb. My lips cannot move quickly enough to shape the words I want to say. The clock in the dashboard reads 6:15 a.m. The thermometer on the door of Don’s van says it's minus 10 degrees. It's dark outside, and where we are the fog obscures our surroundings so totally we can barely see a few feet.

Why are we here?

This morning we're here in search of bald eagles. We're on Hill Road, a pocked gravel route that runs along the base of Sheepy Ridge in Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge. We’re shivering in this van because this region is home to the largest wintering population of bald eagles in the lower 48 states, and we want to see eagles. More specifically, Don wants to photograph them, I want to write about seeing them at close range, and if we can make it up to a blind near the ridgetop by sunrise, we'll have a good chance of doing both.

Gathering our energy, we venture out of the van, boots crunching lightly on the snow-dusted gravel. We leave our permit from Refuge headquarters on the dash and pull out our packs. They're loaded with 50 or 60 pounds of camera gear plus as much other stuff as we can carry to help us keep warm as we sit waiting for eagles to land near us in the blind.

Shouldering our packs, we begin the climb. Although we'll be going up only a few hundred feet, the ridge is steep and we'll spend the better part of an hour reaching our destination. Turns out we're here during a cold snap.

We hadn't planned it that way; phoning the refuge a few days before our planned departure date, Don had learned that a thaw was in progress. Sounded good to me: that meant more open water and more waterfowl activity at the refuges. The thaw also meant that sitting still for a full day in an outdoor bird blind wouldn't be quite so challenging.

But as luck would have it, an Arctic cold front met us just as we arrived in this mostly forgotten northeast corner of California. An uneven layer of new dry snow now coats the slope in front of us, sometimes a foot deep, sometimes only a scant dusting atop the volcanic rocks below. Weeds and brush poke out from under the white blanket, icicles dripping from their higher branches.

Daylight, only a vague pink glow over the horizon behind us as we start out, blooms more quickly than we expect. This is a hard climb, and with each of us carrying so much gear, we stop frequently to catch our breath.

We are perhaps 2/3 of the way up the slope when we spot our first eagles of the day. Sometimes individually, sometimes in loose-knit groups of two or three, they fly over us, coming from behind the ridge and gliding out for a morning feed on the flat expanses of Tule Lake.

But they’re a bit early, or we’re a bit late. We don't want too many eagles to spot us on the open slope, before we're under cover of the blind. Their sharp eyes catch irregularities in their natural world, and they'll give us a wide berth if they see we've invaded their territory. We want to reach the blind as soon as possible; refuge headquarters wants us in there, too, requiring that anyone using the blinds be in them by 7:00 a.m. to minimize disturbance of the birds.

“Run!” says Don, and so, though we're already sweaty and winded, we hasten our stride.

When we finally reach the blind, drained but relieved to be there, the sun has emerged almost completely from behind the mountains east of Tule Lake. As we get set up, there are distant eagles on the frozen lake, but none close by. We settle down to wait for closer shots. We wait. And wait. We begin to wonder if our late arrival ruined our chances for close encounters with eagles this day. I scribble notes, and in between scribbles, I sip tea and struggle to stay warm.

About mid-day Don sees the eagles on the lake begin to scatter. Morning feeding may be over, he thinks, and perhaps a few of the big birds will fly in our direction. Sure enough, within half an hour the eagles begin to fly south along the ridge, some just over us.

Don's eyes are wide, watchful and at full alert, his body tense with anticipation behind the camera. "Incoming!" he hisses, following a bird's progress through his viewfinder. “Immature eagle at 40 feet! At 30 feet! Will it land? It’s landing!”

And then his shutter is clicking, clicking, clicking.

Some eagles fly so close – cruising by within just a few feet of us -- that we can hear the whistle-stroke of their broad wings through the air. Don alternates between keeping quiet and erupting with excited whispers. "We've got another one coming right toward us. Right on track, eye-level. Here it is – hold still – okay, don't move!"

The motor-driven shutter goes off again and again and again. After each big bird goes by I realize I've been holding my breath and let it out in a whoosh.

Don runs out of film.

Next post: "Chasing Swans"

All photos copyright Don Jackson and used courtesy of Don Jackson Photography

Plumes Happen

2010-08-19T15:12:00.003-04:00

Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have taken what they characterize as a major step toward establishing that the Deepwater Horizon disaster created underwater plumes of oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

In a study appearing in the August 19 issue of the journal Science, the researchers gave measurements for a plume they studied in June, before Hurricane Alex forced them to abandon the work. They described it as about 1,100 meters below the Gulf's surface, over 35 kilometers long, 200 meters high and up to 2 kilometers wide. It also contained about 6 to 7 percent of all the BTEX hydrocarbons -- the variously toxic benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes -- which leaked from the Macondo well. In addition, quantities of dissolved oxygen the WHOI team found around the plume had not dropped to levels that would suggest bacteria were breaking down the oil.

The plume might be hard to discern with the naked eye. "It looks like spring water," said Chris Reddy, one of the study's co-authors, describing the samples taken from the plume area. Photos of the water column, however, show a change in water color and turbidity at the level of the plume. In addition, it was clearly detectable using mass spectrometry from an autonomous underwater vehicle which traversed the plume area and found abnormally high levels of hydrocarbons which could be tracked back to BP's Macondo Well.

Remotely operated vehicle (ROV) still images taken during descent through the water column from a location less than 500 meters southwest of the well site on June 1, 2010. Still images were recorded from a forward looking video camera on the ROV. A highly turbid oil-emulsion layer was evident in the depth region between 1065 and 1300 meters, with small oil droplets temporarily collecting on the camera lens within this depth interval.
[Credit: R. Camilli, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution]

The picture painted by WHOI scientists at a press conference today suggest that while the Macondo well might now be sealed, the story of the massive leak's effects is far from over. In answer to questions from journalists, researchers spent as much time detailing what they don't know as what they do. They don't know whether the plume they measured in June still exists, or where it might now be. They don't know its level of toxicity, or how it might be affecting fisheries in the Gulf or consumers eating seafood at NOLA restaurants. They don't know whether its existence might contradict recent government estimates that 75% of the oil spewed out of the shattered Deepwater Horizon rig has somehow been removed from the Gulf.

Given, however, that the very existence of these plumes had initially been denied by BP or had been attributed to natural seepeage, researchers considered this study a very significant scientific step.

"One of the most important aspects of this is to document that these plumes do exist," said Richard Camilli, the study's lead author. "To understand other ecological complications, we have to first establish a base case, plume or no plume."

This research, Camilli added, was able to "document using a fairly rigorous approach not only that the plume did exist but it was stable at a particular depth interval, and that it was not produced by natural seeps."

The study team hopes to learn more about the nature of the plume as they continue analyzing samples over the next several months.

For a series of commentaries on the Gulf oil disaster please visit http://divorceyourcar.blogspot.com

Summer Heat ... in Lake Superior?

2010-07-31T10:10:00.008-04:00

"They're swimming in Superior," read part of a headline in the Detroit Free Press this morning. The item, written by Patrick Condon of Associated Press, reported some news I'd heard already from local friends: Lake Superior is hot this summer -- relatively speaking, of course.

Except in late July and August -- and in the past, sometimes even then -- swimming in Superior generally has required wearing a wetsuit. In summer, it is "normal" for lake temperatures to "warm up" to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, but this year, weather buoy readings have reached as high as 71 -- only one degree shy of the record. And we're still a month ahead of summer's peak heat.

Comments on Superior's current warmth have become as prevalent in local conversation as last winter's comments about the lake's lack of ice cover. There is, of course, a relationship between the two, as lack of ice allows lake waters to absorb more heat. Jay Austin of University of Minnesota at Duluth, quoted in this morning's report, explained some interesting nuances of this ice cover/lake heat relationship for Keweenaw Now a few years ago.

The warmth might feel good for swimmers, but it has worrisome ramifications for wildlife and for business. It is consistent with global warming trends, could promote the growth of invasive species, and might lead to greater evaporation which in turn could lower lake levels. And the effects might not stop there.

"Scientists and fisheries managers are concerned," wrote Patrick Condon in the Associated Press report. So enjoy your swim -- but be prepared for more changes in and around Lake Superior, and all the Great Lakes.

Slow Death by Rubber Duck

2010-04-30T21:54:00.008-04:00

I’ve just finished reading Slow Death by Rubber Duck, a surprisingly charming book about a not-so charming topic: the proliferation of toxic substances in common products and how this exposes us to cancer-causing, brain-wrecking, hormone-disrupting chemicals. Subtitled The Secret Danger of Everyday Things, the book chronicles an experiment cooked up by its authors, Canadian environmental leaders Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie, who decided to shut themselves in a condo with several ubiquitous but highly health-damaging substances, then measure the effects on their bodies.

As Rick and Bruce take turns dosing themselves with phthalates, mercury, and more, the first eight chapters of their book raise awareness about the ways everyday products regularly bring us into contact with chemicals that endanger our health. A ninth chapter tells us how to “detox.” In the course of their experiments, the authors’ facetime with chemicals is somewhat concentrated, but they make a point of only exposing themselves in ways we normally encounter these substances.

In Chapter Two, for instance, Rick exposes himself to phthalates – a group of chemicals used to soften plastic and carry scents – by using a complete set of phthalate-containing body care products over 24 hours. During this same period, he also hangs out in a room with a plug-in air “freshener,” another prime source of phthalates (I can’t think of a more oxymoronic product than these toxin-spewing devices turn out to be). Children, as it happens, regularly consume phthalates when they chew on rubber ducks and other soft plastic toys. Adults and children inhale them because they are in almost every commercial fragranced product on the market, including soaps and other toiletries. With his 24-hour experiment, Rick manages to substantially increase the phthalates in his urine. And if they are coming out in urine, it means they have first traveled into the body and bloodstream, where they mess with hormones.

In Chapter 5, Bruce more than doubles the mercury levels in his blood by eating a series of seven tuna meals and snacks over three days: tuna on sushi trays, tuna sandwiches, tuna steaks. He reports feeling irritable by the time his mercury levels have spiked, perhaps an indication of the neurotoxic action of this heavy metal. Mercury is linked to a wide range of neurological and behavioral problems, and at high enough levels can kill. At this point, thanks mostly to the coal-burning that disperses mercury into the air and from there into the food chain, we all have it in us.

In other chapters, our heroes bravely dose themselves with flame retardants, bisphenol A (BPA), the ubiquitous (and largely unnecessary) antibacterial chemical triclosan (think: Microban®), and Teflon® ingredient PFOA. They also look at pesticides and nanotechnology. Variously cancer-causing, mutagenic, and/or linked to birth defects and developmental problems, all these things contaminate our lives in hidden and unexpected ways.

A good example of this comes from coffee. Buy it organic, fair trade, or shade-grown all you want, but if you run it through a typical coffee maker – most are constructed with polycarbonate plastic – you’ll get BPA in your brew. Rick discovers this when he attempts to lower his BPA exposure before deliberately attempting to raise it in his experiment. In determining how to prep for the procedure, he realizes he can’t drink his coffee from home or office coffee makers, since they’re both mostly plastic. He decides instead to get his coffee from a café that uses a stainless-steel cappuccino machine. But when the café owner gives him a tour of the shop’s entire coffee-making process, he sees two places where beans meet BPA: they sit in one polycarbonate plastic storage tank before grinding, and land in another one once ground. As Rick notes, “The possibility of some serious BPA contamination was there in the grinding process.”

This is typical of the way chemicals have insinuated themselves into our everyday lives. They’ve seeped so far into the cracks and crevices of our existence that it’s impossible to avoid them entirely. However, we can reduce our exposures. In the case of his coffee, Rick finally hits on the solution of using a glass French press coffeemaker. There are similar solutions that can reduce exposures to many toxics, and this book includes very helpful guidance on how to do that.

Equally enlightening and entertaining are the true stories of political struggles over these chemicals. Yes, this book does focus on one side of the issue. These are tales told by environmental campaigners. But this is the side we don’t hear nearly as often as the billions of dollars worth of “Better Living Through Chemistry” messages that inundate us via advertising and public relations campaigns. Slow Death by Rubber Duck reports things that are important for consumers to know, and I don’t doubt that the book serves to balance the overall body of information about chemicals in consumer goods.

Particularly inspiring – even moving – is the story of events leading up to Canada’s 2008 ban of BPA-containing polycarbonate plastic baby bottles. I can understand why the authors saved this chapter for nearly the end of the book, as it closes on a very triumphant note and affirms their opening line: “The book that you’re holding is downright hopeful.” After reading how a horde of stroller-pushing parents swayed Canadian politicians to enact the BPA ban, we’re left with the feeling that similar triumphs are imminent, or at least pending. In the meantime, the book gives enough information to enable readers to watch out for these problematic products and reduce the quantity of toxics in their everyday lives.

This is a very readable blend of science and storytelling, in places even laugh-out-loud funny. Most of us need to raise our awareness about how the chemicals around us can affect our health, and I can’t think of a better way to do so than by reading this kind of book.

Howard Zinn: On Reasons for Optimism

2010-03-30T12:36:00.004-04:00

Howard Zinn concluded his 1994 lecture at Michigan Tech with an expression of optimism that I did not expect, especially as it came right after his description of the shameful treatment of Native Americans in U.S. history, and after he’d stressed the ways factual omissions distort our understanding of history. He closed his talk by saying:

“Unless we begin … thinking about other points of view and enlarging the scope of our understanding, we’re just going to repeat history as it was. My hope is that we are beginning to learn, that people are beginning to think in different ways, and that maybe the next century will be different.”

Then he opened the floor to questions.

This January, after Zinn passed away, I listened to his lecture on an old audiocassette tape. In more than 15 years I’d forgotten much of what Zinn had said, and I’d also forgotten about the Q&A after the talk. So it was with great surprise, as I listened to this part of the tape, that I heard a familiar voice – my own – ask Zinn a question.

“You ended this on an optimistic note,” I said. “What makes you optimistic?”

Zinn paused, and must have had a look on his face, since the audience laughed a little – and then he laughed a little. He might have picked up a slightly incredulous tone in my voice when I asked the question, because he began his answer with:

“Behind that is the thought, ‘How can you be so ridiculously optimistic, given what is happening in the world?’ I’m drawing on my age and experience. We like to do this, we in my position.”

He chuckled again, then continued:

“I’ve lived through situations where things seemed hopeless and where people didn’t seem to have a chance to do anything and yet they did something. That is, going to live in the South when it looked in the mid-1950s as if nothing was going to happen here and then to see a movement spring up and to see an amazing development, and to see suddenly hundreds of thousands of people in action, millions of people becoming aware of what they did, and to see, really, changes take place in a very short time in the South. Obviously not enough. Changes are never enough – it was certainly not enough.

“But yes, real changes take place. To see people who did not seem to have any power at all suddenly develop power, power that comes out of their organization, their sacrifice, their commitment to one another. Same thing with going through the anti-war movement and seeing the feeling of hopelessness at the beginning of the escalation of the war in Vietnam. I mean, how in the world can you affect the decision-making of this powerful country, how can a handful of protestors – I mean, in spring of 1965 we had our first protest meeting against the Vietnam War on the Boston Common. There were a hundred people there, at this anti-war meeting. I remember I was one of the speakers, Herbert Marcuse was one of the speakers, and a hundred people were there, in the spring of ’65. In the fall of ’69, there was another anti-war meeting on the Boston Common and a hundred thousand people were there. In a few years, an anti-war movement had developed all through the country, embracing every section of the population. GIs were coming back from Vietnam, angry at the government, wanting the war to stop, forming an organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Throwing their medals over a fence in protest.

“Sure, we’re not in a great state, but the fact is that people have a capacity to [change things]. Out of what seems like nothing, and powerlessness … the things that they do which are small and isolated and don’t seem to have any effect – at a certain point in history these things begin to come together and you have a great movement and things begin to change.

“It sort of gives me hope that that possibility exists. And I guess I believe that people basically have good common sense and good values. I don’t really believe that people are fundamentally selfish or people are fundamentally, inherently racist or people are fundamentally mean and violent. I believe they are made so by what is fed to them day after day. But I think that at certain points in history, that common sense asserts itself.

“I go around the country, and I speak in different parts of the country, and I speak in places [about which] my friends in Cambridge, Massachusetts, would say: ‘What? You’ve speaking in Texas City, Texas? Is there anybody there who will listen to you?’ Maybe they’ll say this about the Upper Peninsula! ‘Really? Are there people in the Upper Peninsula who care what’s going on?’ …. But there are people all over this country, no matter how small is the town that you go in, anywhere in this country, there are people who care: care about children, care about war, care about poverty.

“I’m convinced that you can’t judge the possibilities in a situation by looking at it at any one point and seeing silence or inaction, and then deciding, well, this is the way it’s always going to be. Surprising things take place. Well, we’ve seen it happen in Eastern Europe, right? Who expected suddenly the rise of great movements of people in Eastern Europe, and governments [to] topple and systems [to] change? Surprises take place in history, and we’re surprised only because we’ve not had the faith that the common sense of people and the good instincts of people and the small acts of people will at certain points come together and have an effect. So I meet a lot of very good people all over the country, and that’s what makes me hopeful.”

Thank you, Howard Zinn, and thanks again to all those who helped bring him to Houghton in 1994. May we continue to live in surprising times.

Howard Zinn: On Political Movements and Democracy

2010-03-29T11:09:00.003-04:00

At the end of my last post, I promised one more excerpt from Howard Zinn’s 1994 lecture at Michigan Tech. Really, though, there are two more posts I want to include here to complete this series. I’ll still end with an entry on Zinn’s optimism, but first, I want to share part of what seeded that optimism by posting some of Zinn’s remarks on political movements and democracy.

Teaching at Spellman College in Atlanta in the late 1950s and early ‘60s put Zinn in the midst of the blossoming Civil Rights Movement. He both witnessed and participated in this striking moment of change in the U.S. Here’s what he told his Michigan Tech audience about that experience, and about the role such movements play in democracies.

Howard Zinn:

“My first real teaching job was in the south [at] Spellman College, a black women’s college in Atlanta, Georgia. I taught there from 1956 to 1963, seven years. My wife and I and our two little kids left New York … and went down south and spent the next seven years essentially living in the black community … at that time in the south when the Civil Rights Movement was coming to its head. And there was no way I could teach in that kind of situation and be neutral – teach in a city like Atlanta, which at that time was as totally segregated by race as Johannesburg, South Africa. A city where if a black person and a white person walked down the street together and it looked as if they weren’t employer and employee, looked as if they might be walking down the street as equals, there was an immediate change in the atmosphere of that street. An immediate tension, an immediate air of threat in the street. That’s what Atlanta was like ….

“You have to understand that southern colleges were more conservative than northern colleges, and women’s colleges more conservative than men’s colleges, and black colleges more conservative than white colleges, and you put all of that together and you have Spellman College, virtually a convent, really, in which students were signing in and signing out and going to compulsory chapel six times a week. There was like an unspoken pact between the City of Atlanta and the black colleges of Atlanta, and the pact was or seemed to be, you can have your nice little Negro college, and turn out the college graduates who will service the segregated black community, the social workers and the teachers and maybe a doctor or a lawyer here or there, and in return, don’t venture out into the city. Don’t trouble the way we live in the City of Atlanta.

“In the late ‘50s and especially in the 1960s, with the sit-ins, that pact was broken. The students at Spellman College and at Morehouse College, the men’s college across the street where Martin Luther King went to school – they saw on television the pictures of the four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, sitting in at a lunch counter, and the violence and the arrests that ensued. And they decided it’s time to move, to do something, and they leaped over the wall – there actually was a stone wall around the Spellman College campus – and they went out into the city and they demonstrated and they got arrested and they came back from that experience no longer the same, no longer the quiet subdued dutiful obedient students they had been. They were very different.

“You mentioned Alice Walker, who was one of my students and who participated in that movement. Marion Wright Edelman, head of the Children’s Defense Fund, who was another one of my students at Spellman, and who came out of jail a very different person than she went in. Then I as a teacher felt that I had to somehow join them. I had to become involved, I had to sit in, I had to march. I didn’t see how I could simply be a classroom teacher while all these things were swirling around me, because I thought by doing that, by just being a classroom teacher and not taking part in what was going on out in the city, that I was teaching my students that it’s all right to talk but not to act. And I felt that a teacher teaches more by what he or she does than by what he or she says. And so I became involved … with a particular civil rights organization in the south, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee … and I went to Albany, Georgia, and I went to Selma, Alabama, and Townsend, Mississippi, and I was both a participant and a writer about these events.

“One of the important things I learned – and this is a lesson that history books, the traditional history books, somehow fail to convey (it struck me that I’d gone through all this training as an American historian and I still hadn’t learned [this] until I saw events unfold before my eyes in the south in a social movement) – what I learned was that when important social change comes about in our country, it doesn’t come about as a result of the operation of our formal democratic system. It doesn’t come about as the result of Congress passing a law, the President signing a law. It doesn’t come about as a result of what we learn in the civics classes in junior high school, the three branches of government, the checks and balances, oh how beautiful it is, how wonderful it works out. Those alone have never sufficed to solve any important problem that we’ve had in the United States. When we have faced important injustices, they were redressed not by the formal structure – voting for this candidate or that candidate – they were addressed by citizens, getting together, forming a movement – the Anti-Slavery Movement before the Civil War, the Labor Movement in the late 19th and 20th centuries, the Black Movement of the 1960s. The Anti-war Movement. The Women’s Movement. The Gay Movement. The Disabled People’s Movement. It’s when citizens get together and organize and do things, that’s when democracy comes alive. I mean, to think that we live in something we call a democracy and that we don’t learn through our history what democracy is, that we come out of all this learning thinking that the most supreme act that a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls every two or four years and vote for somebody we don’t care about? I began to understand that democracy was much more intricate, more complex. It required much more of us than voting, and I suppose in my teaching and in my writing I try to convey that.”

Tomorrow, at last, I’ll put up the final post in this series: Zinn on optimism.

Howard Zinn: On Facts About Wars

2010-03-04T14:02:00.005-05:00

To lead off Howard Zinn’s 1994 lecture at Michigan Tech, Social Sciences Professor Mary Durfee gave a superb introduction, highlighting the famous historian’s experiences both in war and against war. As Durfee said of Zinn, “Here is a man who has been active in pressing the cause of peace, but who was a bombardier during much of World War Two because he believed strongly in combating the evils of fascism.”

Zinn also mentioned his wartime experience, explaining how he had evolved from “enthusiastic bombardier” to peace activist. In fact, a significant part of Zinn’s lecture focused on war, on reasons for and against war, and on the questions we need to ask about war.

We especially need to ask these questions, Zinn said, because the stated reasons for any particular war might not be the prime motivations behind it. It thus becomes important for citizens, historians, and journalists to dig into these motivations, to ask questions about the factors underlying wars, especially if we hope to understand wars and how we might avoid them in the future. This kind of questioning was my own goal in the article, “Afghanistan: War for Oil? Local Voices Weigh In,” published online in 2002 by Keweenaw Now.

With war as his subject, Zinn illustrated for his Houghton audience how he differentiated between the types of facts addressed by history. On one hand, we have standard facts from standard texts – such as names of presidents or dates of events – memorized (or not) by standard students. These, Zinn opined, might not mean as much as the types of facts that he considered more important. Here’s how he explained what he meant.

Howard Zinn:

“There are important facts to ask about – let’s say, in connection with the Mexican War. It’d be very interesting to ask, how did the Mexican War start? The Mexican War, you may recall, took place between 1846 and 1848…. It started with a fabricated incident. It started with the United States government sending troops into a disputed area with Mexico. It wasn’t clear who this land belonged to…. Mexico claimed it, the United States claimed it, but the United States sent troops into this disputed area, whereupon there was a skirmish, blood was shed, and immediately President Polk … announced to the nation, ‘American blood has been shed upon American soil!’

“That happens every once in a while, right? Somebody has done something, somebody has insulted us, somebody has fired at us, somebody has done something to us – we’ve got to go to war, concealing the real reasons for the war. In this case, concealing the fact that Polk and the United States government – they had their eyes on Mexican territory long before this incident took place on the Texas-Mexican border…. There was a big part of Mexico that they coveted, and the war enabled them to get it. Relatively short war, America victorious, and we take 40 percent of Mexican territory: California – nice place to have – Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, that whole area of the southwest. That was Mexico. You wonder, why are there so many Spanish names there? It was Mexican!

“Well, that would be an interesting and important fact to ask about, not because it’s a fact about the past, not just because it informs you about something that you didn’t know about in the past, but because it has very strong connections with things that happened after that and things that are still happening today. Because it raises questions about how wars begin. And to learn that about the Mexican War might lead you to ask questions about other wars. It might lead you to wonder, is it possible that governments – I mean, not just our government, of course, but governments everywhere – find reasons to start wars that they want for purposes that they will not tell the public about.

“It might lead people to ask whether we really went into Cuba to fight Spain in the Spanish-American War in 1898 because we wanted to ‘liberate’ Cuba from Spain, because we were just natural-born ‘liberators.’ But it’s very appealing to think that we are. It’s always appealing to think, well, when we go somewhere, it’s to liberate somebody. Might be interesting to go into that and then ask, well, what happened in Cuba after the United States ‘liberated’ Cuba from Spain? You’ll discover very quickly, we got the Spaniards out, we got ourselves in. Now Cuba no longer belonged to Spain. Now Cuba belonged to us. Now American corporations could go into Cuba. Now American railroads could go into Cuba. Now American banks could go into Cuba. Now United Fruit could go into Cuba. Now we could take several million acres of Cuban land and get it dirt cheap, and we could write into the Cuban constitution the power of the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs whenever we felt like. Well, that’s dangerous thinking….

“We might ask questions then about how did the war in Vietnam start? And we might look into the Gulf of Tonkin episode in 1964, when … the United States leaders … announced that ‘American destroyers have been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin’ …. Nobody asked, ‘What were we doing halfway around the world in the Gulf of Tonkin?’ …. What were our destroyers doing there? And were they really on a ‘routine patrol’ as was claimed by the Secretary of Defense, or were they doing something else? And in fact did the attack really take place? There was no physical evidence of any attack. Nobody had been hurt, no injury had been done to any American vessel….

“What if people then ask questions about the Gulf War? …. Did we really go into the Gulf War because President Bush’s heart ached for Kuwait? And because President Bush just is emotionally moved every time one country invades another? Is that why? People might ask: Why did we go into Panama? Did we really go to end the drug trade? Any of you who have followed the situation in Panama since the United States went into Panama and yanked Noriega out – any of you who have followed the drug trade will learn that the drug trade has increased since that time.

“Anyway, yes, there are historical facts which are important and interesting because they reverberate through history and they come down to our present day and they raise important questions about national policy which as citizens we should be asking….

“I guess all of this is to explain my point of view in teaching American history…. I was – I dropped bombs in the Second World War. I hesitated to tell you which war that I was in, but I thought if I didn’t say it, you might think it was the Spanish-American War. [audience laughs]

“But it was the Second World War, what is known as ‘The Good War,’ right. That’s the war that has the best reputation. It’s the best of wars, although some of you may have noticed if any of you have read Studs Terkel’s oral history of World War Two, you may have noticed that he puts quotation marks around ‘The Good War.’ And when I came out of the Air Force, although I had been an enthusiastic bombardier, by the time I finished and came out of the Air Force, I, too, was putting quotation marks around it. I was beginning to have questions about this simplistic notion that there are good wars and bad wars …. Especially as the years went on and I observed the world after the war, the world that had been promised as: now, finally, a world without fascism, without racism, without Hitler, you know, this would be the good world, after the expenditure of 40 million, 50 million lives. And I guess I came to the conclusion that war, even the best of wars, really doesn’t solve anything in the long run. And that somehow, human beings have to find different ways of solving problems of aggression and tyranny, all the problems that exist in the world, the real problems. Not to be passive, [but] to find a way to solve these problems without the massive destruction of human life and the corruption of values that goes along with it.”

Coming soon, one more excerpt from Howard Zinn's 1994 MTU lecture: Zinn on his reasons for optimism.

Howard Zinn: On the Native American Perspective

2010-02-01T08:56:00.005-05:00

When Howard Zinn lectured in Houghton in 1994, his remarks included stories about his well-known book, A People’s History of the United States. One such story involved the first chapter of the book, a chapter that examines the arrival of Columbus in North America from the Indians’ perspective.

Zinn didn’t tell this story until nearly the end of his lecture, but something in his tone suggested – at least to me -- that he wanted to emphasize it, to leave us with this so we would remember.

He had good reason to do this, if in fact it was his motive. “The really crucial distortions in history come not from lies,” he had told us, “but from omissions.” One of the most significant of these omissions has been the neglect and even suppression of the Native American perspective in history.

In A People’s History of the United States, Zinn addressed this omission head-on. Here’s what he said about it to the audience at Michigan Tech.

Howard Zinn:

“I’ll say one more thing. It has to do with Native Americans, with Indians. When I began to write my book, A People’s History of the United States – and I knew already what my point of view was, I knew I was going to write American history from the standpoint of people who I felt had been ignored mostly in American history. …. I knew I had to start the book with Columbus, because there it is at the beginning. …. And I had learned about Columbus just the way every American has learned for generations about Columbus, the same story. About Columbus the adventurer, Columbus the brave man, Columbus the intrepid sailor, Columbus the discoverer of the New World, one of our heroes. ….

“What about the point of view of the people he encountered when he arrived, the Native Americans, the Indians? What would their point of view be about Columbus? And so in looking into that I learned – I’m a little ashamed to say this. Here I was with a PhD in history, and I was learning about Columbus things that I absolutely did not know. About what he did. About Columbus as a person who kidnapped Indians, who enslaved them, who mutilated them, who killed them, and who was driven by greed, by profit, by the need to send something back to his financiers back in Europe. And how a whole Indian population on Hispaniola, on this island that Columbus and his other Spanish conquerors spent time on, how a whole Indian population was wiped out on that island. And so I started my book that way.

“I found that when my book appeared, and I began to get mail from around the country about the book, almost all of the mail was about the first chapter of the book. About Columbus. …. It seemed that the reason was that this was the most startling thing in the book. Because Americans have not been given that information. ….

“If you begin to look at American history from a Native American point of view, lots of things look different. The whole ‘noble’ history of American expansion – which I remember in high school making me proud, as I looked on the map that the teacher put up there showing how we grew -- ‘grew’ as if it were a biological thing, just ‘natural’ in our genes to grow – from this straggling bunch of colonies along the Atlantic across to the Pacific. At whose expense? How many people did we kill? How many tribes were massacred? How many civilizations were destroyed by that great triumphant expansion?

“If you look at the Civil War …. during the Civil War, more land was taken from the Indians in the West than in any other period of American history. During the Civil War, while some armies were fighting the Confederates, other armies of the United States government were out west destroying Indian tribes in order to gain more territory. In 1863, the very time that the Emancipation Proclamation had just been issued, an Army out in Utah was massacring a Shoshone tribe of peaceful Indians to get that territory. In 1864, another massacre [took place] at Sand Creek, Colorado. Now, in how many historical accounts of the Civil War do we learn about that? ….

“If we don’t want … to repeat those horrors, then it seems to me that it’s absolutely necessary … to get away from that nationalistic narrow white male elite point of view which is given to us in our history books.”

During Q&A after Zinn’s remarks, an audience member made this comment:

“You brought up the Native perspective of history …. An example in 1934 is the Indian Reorganization Act. Reservations were supposed to be sovereign nations [but] the Indian Reorganization Act forced Natives to change their governments to resemble ‘democratic systems.’ Another example would be the supposed ‘freedom of religion’ … where they took native children off the reservation and took them to a boarding school, and if they practiced their religion or spoke their language they were beaten and whipped. The last boarding school closed in 1987. You could just dwell on Leonard Peltier still being in prison. That’s a whole other realm of the Native perspective, and Native issues not being [included in] history. It’s still going on today.”

Zinn replied:

“What you’re saying of course is important, and this is a huge gap in our knowledge of American history, something that’s passed over very very quickly. I think one of the important things that’s passed over is the kind of civilizations that Native Americans developed on this continent before the presumably ‘advanced’ civilization of the white man came in to replace it.

“The example that you cite is part of that, where – in the 19th century they decided at a certain point that they’ve got to take young Indians out of the tribal atmosphere and send them to boarding schools so they could be acculturated in the American way – an attempt, really, to destroy Indian culture. Senator Dawes, the author of the Dawes Act – which had as its motive the sort of turning of the Indians, well, into little capitalists, little individual owners of land – Dawes at one point visited a Cherokee tribe, and came away saying, ‘Really, these people, I don’t understand them, they sort of own everything in common, they share things. They don’t understand what is at the root of civilization: selfishness!’ That’s the word he used, really.”

Again, thanks to Howard Zinn and to everyone who helped bring him to Houghton in 1994.

Howard Zinn: On Objectivity and Omissions

2010-01-28T12:41:00.013-05:00

In December of 1994, Howard Zinn came to Houghton to speak at Michigan Technological University. I was fortunate to be in the audience as he gave one of the most provocative and consciousness-raising lectures of the many I've heard on that campus. After Zinn passed away on Wednesday, I dug out an old audiotape of his talk and was reminded just how important he was as a thinker, writer, and advocate.

Introduced as a man with "a whole litany of academic achievements," Zinn was also lauded for having "taken to the streets for civil rights, peace and justice." Alice Walker, who studied with Zinn at Spelman College, once called him an "unassuming hero." "Unassuming" indeed seemed apt for the slender, spry and casual fellow who stood before us that evening.

"Thanks for inviting me to a part of the country I've never been in. But then again," he said to all who'd tromped through the snows of this remote, sparsely populated region to hear him, "I guess I'm not alone." Everyone laughed.

Zinn quickly moved on to more serious matters: his approach to teaching, academic politics, war and peace, civil rights, the shameful neglect of Native American perspectives in history. His ideas have important implications for everyone and in particular for writers and journalists, those of us who chronicle politics, culture and life.

I haven't read all of Zinn's books, but I'm guessing some or all of what he said at Michigan Tech appears elsewhere in his work. Still, it's important enough to repeat. In memory of Howard Zinn, below are some of the comments he made in that lecture. Emphases in bold are mine. I hope to post further excerpts in the next few days.

Howard Zinn:

"I started out teaching with the idea that I was not going to be a neutral teacher. I would start my classes, the very first day I would tell my students, 'This is not a neutral class, I want to make that clear. I am not a neutral teacher. I am going to express my point of view as strongly as I can, and I want you to express your view as strongly as you can. And then it'll be more interesting.' ....

"In fact, you can't be neutral. It's impossible. That is, we live in a world in which things are already happening, things are already in motion .... People are already dying in wars. Terrible things are happening. To be neutral, to be passive, to be uncommitted, to be standing outside of this, to pretend to be objective is to collaborate in whatever is going on. The word 'collaborate' had a very very special meaning during World War Two and during the years of Fascism. People who lived in Fascist countries, or people who were overrun by Fascist powers and who did nothing ... you might say, oh, they were being neutral. They weren't being neutral. They were collaborating by doing nothing.

"And so I thought from the beginning I was not going to be a neutral historian .... I guess I went into history with a very modest aim: I wanted to change the world. I wanted to do something useful .... I wanted to go into the past and I wanted to see what I could learn that would be useful for the things that are going on in the world today and I wanted to come out and DO something. And I knew it would be safer just to stay in the past, and very often that's the great inducement for not coming out, and not applying history to the urgent and controversial issues of today. It's safer that way. But I guess to -- well, to put it in contemporary language, I didn't want to practice safe history.

"I was aware that when history was talked about as an important thing for people to learn ... that very often it was talked about as something that required people to learn a certain set of important facts, a certain amount of important information. This was the emphasis: facts. It seemed very clear to me that there was no such thing as just a fact without a judgment. That is, every fact -- every selected fact to be put into a book, to be presented in a class, to be passed on to somebody else -- every fact is selected out of an infinite number of facts and therefore every fact represents a judgment that this fact is important. So to say, well, this is a purely factual account -- and it may be, in the sense that everything in this account is true -- but why just these things that go into this account, and what are the things that are omitted from the account?

"The important things in history, the important distortions in history, do not come from outright lies in history, outright falsehoods. That would be relatively easy to check up on. The really crucial distortions in history come not from lies, but from omissions. And when things are omitted, well -- you have no way of checking up. The information is being kept from you. And this is true whether it's in history books or on television screens or in the newspapers. When the New York Times says 'All the news that's fit to print,' that is an arrogant and false statement. [It's] all the news that the Times editors deemed fit for you to read. But there are a lot of other things going on in the country that the New York Times does not report."

More to come. Recalled, transcribed and reprinted with thanks to Howard Zinn and to all who contributed to bringing him to the little town of Houghton, Michigan, in December of 1994.

Church of the Almighty Dollar

2010-01-24T14:10:00.008-05:00

On a September 2009 visit to a small Upper Michigan town, my spouse and I came across this historic church, now office space for investment brokers.

The stone structure displays a plaque which tells passers-by of its identity, when first built in 1908, as the Immanuel Baptist Church. The plaque blends discreetly into the building’s rock walls. In contrast, each single letter in the brokerage sign beside it stands taller and some stretch wider than the entire historical nameplate.

In the autumn evening light, this Church of the Almighty Dollar struck us as iconic. We spotted it at the end of a tumultuous year in U.S. economic history, a year in which “bailout” became the buzzword and “too big to fail” furnished the favored rationale for corporate welfare.

This converted house of worship seems even more symbolic of the country’s prevailing ideology today, after last week's Supreme Court strike-down of restrictions on corporate political spending. Follow the money. If ever we needed separation of church and state, we need it now – from this kind of church.

©2010 by Katie Alvord

Resisting the Lure of the Web

2010-01-16T17:01:00.007-05:00

For a writer, avoiding distractions on the web can be a challenge. I don’t know about you, but I can lose hours playing around online when I might otherwise be writing. Yet since a computer is now a publishing writer’s primary tool, the risk of online distractions is ever present. For any other writers out there who might need self-discipline aids, here are some steps I now take to manage my tangential surfing.

1) I set goals for online time. I don’t connect until I know exactly what I intend to accomplish by doing so: who I need to contact, what facts I need to check, and so on.

2) I prioritize my goals. I figure out which ones are most critical and address those first. Sometimes it helps me to write them out – yes, with pen and paper! – and turn them into a checklist.

3) I set a time limit. This helps especially when my goals are research-related. Chasing down links can send you on a websites-long trail of information, where you’ll likely find lots and lots of material related to your research question, probably all very interesting, but also probably of low value. When I use a time limit, it helps me control this by reminding me of my priorities and keeping me efficient.

4) I also set a lights-out limit. I do this for health reasons: staring at that lit-up video screen at night affects the pineal gland and suppresses production of melatonin, making it harder to sleep. I know of at least one expert -- neurobiologist Dietrich Klinghardt, MD PhD -- who recommends no video of any kind after about 8:30 p.m. if you want to sleep well.

5) Finally, I give myself some web play time – after my writing and research are done. All work and no play not only dulls us, it also precludes those serendipitous discoveries of strange and wonderful web items that only show up when you diddle around. Giving myself sacrosanct play time helps me keep my work time sacrosanct, too: if I don’t let myself play, I’m much more likely to cheat as I work. Plus it’s much nicer to surf without your inner critic's nagging voice guilt-tripping you about the article or next chapter you SHOULD be writing.

Which reminds me -- I have a bit more work to do before I hit my lights-out limit. Happy writing!

Environmental writing redux

2010-01-09T19:05:00.008-05:00

I’m thinking back over the directed study I taught at Finlandia University last fall, Environmental Writing and Literature. Leading this little course let me come at the topic from a different angle than usual.
Instead of being immersed in environmental writing as one of its practitioners, I got to step back and look at the whole body of environmental literature.
Examined broadly, environmental lit is more complex and varied than you might first imagine. It includes nature writing, which itself is quite varied. You can see this if you look at some of its classics, from HD Thoreau’s Walden to Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf to Terry Tempest William’s Refuge. You can also see this from looking at Tom Lyon’s wonderful anthology This Incomparable Land which proposes a marvelous taxonomy of nature writing.

Overlapping with but also going beyond nature writing is environmental journalism, which ranges from stories about sewage in your local paper to features on global climate change written for E Magazine. Sometimes it’s hard to tell on what side of the line a piece of writing might fall. Should we label Bill McKibben, for instance, a nature writer or an environmental journalist? Or is the more general “environmental writer” the best moniker?

Environmental journalism is further complicated by the drift into what some call advocacy journalism. Here I’m thinking about articles of the sort published in Sierra or Audubon or Earth Island Journal – often an important source of factual information, but clearly presented with a slant. In contrast, environmental journalists who write for mainstream news outlets strive for objectivity just as much as reporters on any other beat.

In our directed study, we also added ecofiction and green poetry to the mix. Originally I was just looking for a way to get a Carl Hiaasen novel onto the syllabus (we read Skinny Dip) but we really could have done an entire class on ecofiction alone, it’s that rich and varied a genre. Skinny Dip, by the way, details the environmental travesties of the Florida sugar industry in the context of a truly hilarious albeit raunchy story. Not so hilarious is the true part, i.e., what’s happened to the Everglades as a result of agriculture and development in South Florida.

Environmental writing and literature, I decided after teaching this class, is both expansive and expanding. The latter, no doubt, is a sign of our times.

Snow Poetry As Read by Weather Radio

2009-12-19T17:17:00.006-05:00

On December 12th, I posted "Chance of Snow, Then Snow" -- a found poem composed entirely of forecast phrases from NOAA Weather Radio and inspired, one day during a blizzard, by the rhythmic reporting of snow variations on our local Weather Radio station WXK73. Thinking they might like to see the poem, I e-mailed the link to the nice folks at the National Weather Service office in Marquette, who manage that station. They totally floored me by sending back an audio file of their radio computer voice reading my poem!

So now you can listen to the poem being read by the voice that inspired the poem. Click on the arrow below to play the audio. Thanks to the National Weather Service office in Marquette for this recording, and for the great job they do providing us with weather information!

Chance of Snow, Then Snow

2009-12-12T10:05:00.005-05:00

Found poetry, says Wikipedia, is "created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry." This is exactly what I did one day a few winters ago as I sat housebound by a blizzard, listening on and off to NOAA weather radio and hoping for a break in the storm.

The more I listened to the winter voice of the National Weather Service, broadcasting from Marquette, the more I settled into its distinctive rhythm, and then -- yes -- its poetry. I heard not only information, but also nuance and progression: the arc of a story in what appeared out my window as relentless, monotonous white.

That day, I jotted down my favorite forecast phrases and tweaked them into this verse. I offer it here now in light of the Upper Peninsula weather of the last few days, as well as the weather to come. Happy winter!

Chance of Snow, Then Snow*

Expect cooler temperatures,
Single digits.

Chance of snow,
Snow flurries.
Light snow,
Snow likely.
Scattered snow,
Snow showers.
Blowing snow,
Snow falling.
Heavy snow,
Snow accumulation.

Snow and drifting snow --
Snow and fog --
Snow and ice --
Snow and sleet --
Snow and freezing spray.

Snow will begin to diminish!
Breezy.

-Katie Alvord

* Composed entirely of forecast phrases from NOAA weather radio station WXK73, originating from the National Weather Service office in Marquette

© 2006, 2009 by Katharine T. Alvord

More Eco-fiction

2009-11-22T18:46:00.003-05:00

Our shelf of eco-fiction is expanding. Here is a new list that includes suggestions from a few sources, including those who commented on the previous post:

Black Sun by Edward Abbey
Good News by Edward Abbey
The Monkey-Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi
Almost everything by Nevada Barr (Bittersweet, Blind Descent, Blood Lure, Deep South, Endangered Species, Firestorm, Flashback, Hard Truth, High Country, Hunting Season, Ill Wind, A Superior Death, Track of the Cat, Winter Study)
A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle
Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
Looking for Peyton Place by Barbara Delinsky
Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman
The Lobo Outback Funeral Home by Dave Foreman
Everything by Carl Hiaasen (Basket Case, Double Whammy, Flush, Hoot, Lucky You, Sick Puppy, Skinny Dip, Stormy Weather, Tourist Season)
Dune by Frank Herbert, and all the Dune books
Many works by Tony Hillerman (e.g. The Fallen Man, The Wailing Wind, The Sinister Pig)
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
Purgatory Ridge by William Kent Krueger
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Skyward by Mary Alice Monroe
The Beach House by Mary Alice Monroe
The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
He, She, and It by Marge Piercy
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
The Story of B by Daniel Quinn
Works by Elizabeth Quinn (e.g. A Wolf in Death's Clothing, Murder Most Grizzly)
Works by Kim Stanley Robinson (The Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars; Three Californias Trilogy: The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge; Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting, Antarctica)
Alaska Dragon by Benjamin Shaine
Works by Dana Stabenow (e.g. Dead in the Water, Play with Fire)
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
Grass by Sheri Tepper

Have anything more to add to the list? Once again, your comments are welcome!

What is Eco-Fiction?

2009-11-06T18:00:00.003-05:00

Last week, in the small directed study I teach at Finlandia University on Environmental Writing and Literature, we started a unit on eco-fiction. This is our third focus in the class; previously, we covered nature writing and then environmental journalism. Books we’ve read so far include Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams; Stuff by John Ryan and Alan Durning; Bill McKibben’s Hope, Human and Wild; and Lisa Margonelli’s Oil on the Brain. We’ve also looked at nature essays and environmental journalism articles by various other authors.

With eco-fiction, we began by attempting a definition. First, and most obviously, eco-fiction is fiction, i.e., not a true story. At its basis, though, is some sort of truth – an environmental truth. Whether it’s classic literature (say, Jack London’s Call of the Wild) or eco sci-fi (maybe Frank Herbert’s Dune or Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed) it makes some sort of statement about the human relationship to the environment. It also in some way expresses concern for the non-human world, and/or human survival.

More could probably be said, but that’s what we have for our definition so far. Next, we looked at examples of eco-fiction. In class, we assembled a short bookshelf of some of the eco-fiction found in Finlandia’s library as well as in my own, including:

The Monkey-Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
Winter Study by Nevada Barr
A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle
Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
Looking for Peyton Place by Barbara Delinsky
The Lobo Outback Funeral Home by Dave Foreman
Flush by Carl Hiaasen
Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaasen
Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen
Dune by Frank Herbert
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Skywatch by Mary Alice Monroe
The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

This is hardly an extensive list, but with this as a start, I’d like to build one. If you’re reading this, I have two questions for you:

1) What eco-fiction titles would you add to this list? (Conversely, is there anything above you might delete?)

2) What would you add to or change about our definition of eco-fiction?

Your comments are welcome!

A Few SEJ Highlights

2009-10-25T20:58:00.009-04:00

It's been a couple of weeks, but I'm still recovering from the jam-packed schedule at this year's Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Below are a few photo highlights.

On Wednesday evening, Tia Nelson -- daughter of Earth Day founder Senator Gaylord Nelson -- regaled diners at the opening plenary with tales of political deals done over drinks -- and more drinks.

Thursday, most of us took off on tours; I joined the "Wetlands, Wildlife, and Wind" trip which included a pontoon boat ride into Horicon Marsh, an internationally important wetland in central Wisconsin.

Of course it started raining as soon as we embarked on the boat ride. The canvas roofing over the boats kept most of us dry.

Our tour visited the 86-turbine wind farm that started operating near Horicon Marsh last year. It's hard to capture the scale of these towers, but the blade tips reach 400 feet into the air.

Back at the conference center, we encountered the usual sea of handouts. My eyes go about this blurry after reading the piles of material I end up bringing home from SEJ.

Friday morning, Andrew Revkin (right) of the New York Times hosted a breakfast session on climate change with Jane Lubchenco of NOAA and Jonathan Lash of the World Resources Institute.

Al Gore headlined Friday morning's plenary about climate change. That's conference co-chair Peter Annin of IJNR hidden behind the potted plants on the right.

Paul Ehrlich got chuckles with his usual outspoken style at a well-attended panel presentation on population.

On Saturday, conference co-chair Peter Annin interviewed UN water advisor Maude Barlow as part of a fabulous panel on water issues. Annin's excellent book, The Great Lakes Water Wars, won a 2007 Great Lakes Book Award.

Saturday afternoon gave some of us a chance for a bicycle tour of Madison -- which aims to become the best bicycling city in the U.S.

Saturday night, we bussed out to the LEED-certified Aldo Leopold Center for a great party, where I ran into some old friends and had a notable discussion with Mike and Pat Dombeck about the annual Trenary Outhouse Races (something you know about if you've ever lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, as the Dombecks did formerly and as I do now).

Sunday morning at the UW-Madison Arboretum, Wendell Berry headlined a wonderful panel focused on Aldo Leopold's legacy.

Nina Bradley (Aldo Leopold's daughter) and Wendell Berry shared a lighter moment during Q&A after the panel presentations. Curt Meine organized the panel, which also included former Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck and Aldo Leopold's son Carl.

Curtis Prairie displayed its autumn palette to those of us taking a final hike around the Arboretum grounds.

We departed the Arboretum after the hike to head home. I don't know how others feel, but SEJ conferences usually leave me in a state of combined exhaustion and excitement, full of so many fresh writing ideas I'm not sure where to start once I'm back at my desk. I'll probably do this again next year when the SEJ conference goes to Missoula, Montana. Looking forward to it!

A nice copy editor, in case you're looking ....

2009-08-14T10:01:00.003-04:00

If you're looking for a copy editor to review your work, I just met one who comes highly recommended. A former journalist, Laurie Gibson is based in Monterey, California, and works freelance. Her clients include both publishers and writers.

I took Laurie's class "Book Publishing 1-2-3" when I was last in California, and I was impressed both with her knowledge of writing and publishing, and with her good humor. The many testimonials I've read about her say that she's a pleasure to work with, and I can see why! She can be contacted at wordworker1@earthlink.net.

Suzanne Strempek Shea and Two Pages a Day

2009-05-07T11:18:00.015-04:00

The Writer's Journey series at Finlandia University ended last month with a flourish: a wonderful presentation by New England writer Suzanne Strempek Shea. She is the author of five novels and three non-fiction books, in addition to a slew of articles for newspapers and magazines.

I've read Suzanne's novel Becoming Finola, a delightful excursion from the U.S. to Ireland and through the realms of identity. I'm looking forward to reading Shelf Life, a memoir of her real-life experiences as an author working in a bookstore. And then there's Sundays in America, her most recent book and the one she discussed at Finlandia.

To write Sundays in America, Suzanne spent a year traveling to different Christian churches each week. She sat in on services from the very small – a congregation of Shakers in Maine, where the 20 visitors outnumbered the four actual church members – to the unabashedly huge – a stadium seating 16,000, where the televangelist's sermon, she said, consisted largely of diet tips.

Suzanne spoke of all this with humor and pizazz, the same engaging and approachable style I found when I paged through the book. Listening to her, I found myself thinking: what a great way to learn more about something that is so important to American culture, and to so many of us personally. Now Sundays in America is on my must-read list.

In keeping with the Writer's Journey theme, Suzanne also talked about her life as a writer, and stressed a point that appears over and over in the literature: If you want to be a writer, the most important thing you can do is write. Establish a discipline.

"Sit down each day, even if it's for two words or two sentences," Suzanne says. She herself writes two pages a day, at least five or six days a week, and notes, "When I'm really on a roll, it's every day." She departs from that schedule for "general life crises," and adds, "When I feel ill, I curl up and watch bad TV."

It doesn't sound like much, but with two pages a day she has produced eight books and 12 to 24 articles per year in the 20 years she's been freelancing (she worked as a reporter for almost a decade before that). Learning that writer Elinor Lipman writes two pages a day inspired Suzanne to begin this (Lipman just released her tenth book, The Family Man). It's not an uncommon practice: I heard years ago that Sue Grafton writes two pages a day, and that's how she's produced her alphabet of best-selling mysteries.

This underlines Suzanne's point. Whether it's two words, two lines, two pages, or two hours a day, persistence pays off. In my own career, I have observed over and over that this persistence, this steady practice, is the number one most common denominator for success as a writer. So I agree wholeheartedly with Suzanne. The most important part of any writer's journey is to write, and keep at it.

The Writer's Journey seminars are over for the year, but they were so well received that there has been talk of holding them again. My opinion: such a great series bears repeating. Kudos to Finlandia and everyone involved in putting these on, and I hope you, too, will keep at it!

Much appreciation again to Karen Johnson for providing these images of Suzanne Strempek Shea speaking and reading at Finlandia's Chapel of St. Matthew. Thanks, Karen!

A Successful Novel

2009-04-19T10:09:00.012-04:00

I had never heard of Tonga until one of my school friends ended up going there for the Peace Corps. Even then, I didn't learn much beyond the bits and pieces that filtered back from his remote location – like "South Pacific paradise" and "he might marry a Tongan woman and stay" – snippets that evoked exotic images of coconut palms, languid beaches, and our buddy gone native.

He didn't end up staying, but I ended up with a sense of mystique about the place. That only deepened -- though maybe in a different way -- when I heard reports of a rare and gruesome murder within Peace Corps ranks in Tonga at around that same time.

I'm not sure whether my friend was in Tonga at the time of the murder, but Jan Worth was there, and close enough to those involved to be deeply affected. Her resulting autobiographical novel Night Blind gives a remarkable account of Peace Corps life in Tonga in the late 1970s. As happened in real life, in this fictional account the lead character's coming of age gets complicated when a horrible murder shocks her Tongan island community and leaves her reeling.

Night Blind is a rare find: a literary novel that's also a page turner. Crafted with scathing honesty, it is in turns funny, touching, shocking, entertaining, and deeply compelling.

Jan is a gifted storyteller, one of those writers so facile with words that she makes a novelist's work look easy. In reality, though, it's not so easy, and when Jan came last week to Finlandia University to present a Writer's Journey seminar, she delivered that message in person.

On the way to publishing Night Blind, she said, she slogged through multiple drafts, many years, an agent or two, and 40 rejections. "I turned into an old woman, writing this novel about a young woman," she told us.

Especially after reading the book and seeing how good it is, this was a potent reminder for me of how random success as a writer -- and especially success as a novelist -- can be. (I've even heard publishing professionals cite studies that demonstrate this.) Rejections notwithstanding, once Jan decided to take charge of publishing her novel by going through iUniverse, the book went on to become a finalist for Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Award in Literary Fiction.

iUniverse is one of the newer web-based publishing options that provides editorial, printing, and on-line sales support for self-publishing. The process is more financially risky for authors but provides a lot more control. Jan reported that, by using iUniverse, she has sold more copies of her novel than many colleagues who've published through university presses.

I was sold on the book by seeing her in person. Her engaging wit had us chuckling in the chapel; given the surroundings, some of us were attempting to respectfully stifle guffaws but Jan still had us laughing out loud. Here, for instance, is part of what she read from her novel:

When [the Peace Corps' Tonga] Group 17 first heard the [Tongan] language spoken – in late August, in the California Hotel in San Francisco during staging – titters erupted when Pulu, who met us there, announced with a straight face, "Volunteers, the word for beautiful is faka'ofa'ofa." The word for respect -- a key concept in the soberly formal culture – was faka'apa'apa. Doing things the Tongan way was fakatonga. Even the word murder, which we learned first as merely a curiosity, never dreaming of its hard attack into our lives, was fakapo -- literally, of the dark. Pulu had no particular explanation. He swore it had no connection with, well, that English word, which out of Tongan courtesy he would not say. Faka was just a linguistic quirk, a coincidence. No wonder everybody got horny. I especially enjoyed hearing it come from the mouths of the pious American do-gooders – our trainer Liz, for example, or Evelyn Henry, the sanctimonious country director. If they wanted to communicate, they had to force their lips and tongues to form the "F" word. Even to say please required fakamolemole.

For me, in 1976, it felt right, fuck being a totemic word in my personal lexicon. For me as a preacher's daughter, swearing carried particular power.... So I was greatly amused when, in the fall of 1976 for hours every morning, I was repeating one word after another that sounded like fuck. The weather was faka'ofa'ofa. The discussions were fakafiefia, enjoyable, and when I began to get better at it, I tried to fakakata, or make people laugh.

Jan's humor, depth of insight, full-bodied engagement with the world, and love of language emanate not just from her novel but also from her poems and other writings. You can sample her poetry at her website, and read the first two chapters of her novel online. You can also buy Night Blind locally at North Wind Books, or online at iUniverse. I recommend it!

Thanks once more to Karen Johnson of Finlandia University for these photos of Jan Worth at the Writer's Journey seminar.

Fear of the Dark

2009-04-13T12:10:00.013-04:00

Arrayed across a card table in my living room sit three hefty stacks of paper I think of as Fat, Fatter, and Fattest. They are three incomplete drafts of a novel I'm writing. It's not the "Great American Novel" and was never meant to be, but it might be a decent story if I could ever bring myself to finish it.

I write and publish nonfiction, but also have a few poems and short stories out there in forgotten semi-literary corners. Psychologically, I find publishing fiction and poetry much harder than nonfiction: it's so much more personal, and thus so much more scary. A novel, the longest form of fiction, seems scariest of all.

These thoughts came up as I listened to Suzanne Van Dam speak a couple weeks ago at Finlandia University's Writer's Journey seminar. Suzanne talked about writing novels and read from her very interesting and entertaining work-in-progress, Camp Atonement, about Northwoods volunteers helping the post-Katrina recovery effort in New Orleans.

At one point, Suzanne offered a quote something like this: "Writing a novel is like driving cross-country at night. You can only see as far as the end of your headlight beams, but if you keep going, you'll reach your destination."

Like putting one foot in front of the other or taking things a day at a time, it's a useful metaphor (despite the fact it's about driving, ahem!). A novel is a huge project, requiring many days, many steps, the traveling of many miles; the process is so easily sidetracked by fears. Like, what if it's no good? What if I spend years of my life creating something no one else likes? On the other hand, what if they DO like it? Will they expect MORE good books? Will I disappoint them? And what if they make me appear on Oprah?

All these possibilities are out there in the dark, beyond the headlight beams. They are big, pesky distractions from why, in the first place, I write. I write because writing makes a difference for me, as mentioned in a previous post, and it can make a difference in the world. I also write because there is something about the process that draws me in, that I need like food and water. I write because in some glorious moments I can reach a place where that process becomes exhilarating, outside of time.

Those are moments when I can fully enjoy the part of my path that is lit, and forget all about my fear of the dark. They are moments worth cultivating, and I think the metaphor Suzanne offers can help with that. Because really, we have to focus on what's within the headlight beams, or we won't make it to the end of the journey. Thanks, Suzanne, for that reminder.

Photos of Suzanne Van Dam presenting a Writer's Journey seminar are courtesy of Karen Johnson, Finlandia University. Thanks, Karen!

COMING: a post about Jan Worth and her excellent novel Night Blind.

A Great Correction? Musings on Sandra Postel's Water Ethic

2009-03-30T07:42:00.012-04:00

Lake Superior lines a part of the horizon I see out my north-facing window. Looking at such a vast expanse of water, it's sometimes hard to grasp that an even vaster expanse of the world is what water policy expert Sandra Postel calls "water stressed." Close to a billion human beings, and likely higher numbers from other species, do not have access to the water they need to survive and thrive.

After Postel spoke last week at Michigan Tech, I went online to quote her water ethic: "Provide all living things with enough water before some get more than enough." It's obviously not an ethic our society now lives by.

My posting got a response from former schoolmate Tim Tynan, who wrote: "Too late to follow that advice for salmon in the Pacific Northwest, I'm afraid. So, what to do now to save the species?" As a federal agency fisheries biologist, Tim fights an administrative battle to preserve what's left of a once monumental salmon population. At work, he says, he "slays dragons to rescue fish in distress." (He is quick to clarify that his statements here are his personal opinion, and not reflective of the agency he works for.)

Click here for a video about salmon restoration in Northern California from Occidental Arts & Ecology Center's Water Institute

When I asked Tim what would change if we truly lived by Postel's ethic, he answered: "A bunch of farms, tract homes and communities in the west (especially eastern Washington and California) would dry up and blow away. Water in the majority of our major salmon production areas is already over-appropriated water right-wise, with still more development and people moving into those areas. For salmon watersheds, we are trying to preserve the best, and hope for the best for the remainder."

This all makes me think of the economic "bubble," now burst, and the short-term thinking which has allowed the building of all the water-hungry farms and tract homes and communities that generate water stress by allowing human infrastructure and population to grow past carrying capacity.

Does the current economic slowdown give us any opportunity to change that? To find prosperity in different ways? Postel herself believes that we are in the midst of a "great correction" – a "balancing between the human economy and natural resources."

I'd like to believe she's right. I'd like to believe we'll all learn that human survival depends on the survival of other species, that if salmon and so many others go down, we will inevitably follow. I'd like to believe that as a culture, we will realize this in time to stop that trend, and even reverse it.

In the meantime, I'm grateful to all those like Tim who, even despite dismal odds, still do what they can on a daily basis to slow down the effects of our short-sightedness.

Read the report about Sandra Postel's Michigan Tech speech and other Copper Country news at Keweenaw Now

Writing Makes a Difference

2009-02-15T08:43:00.008-05:00

Adapted from remarks given at "The Writer's Journey" seminar series, Finlandia University, January 29, 2009

This afternoon I want to share a few things about my own writer's journey. I organized what I have to say around the idea that writing makes a difference.

The way I see it, writing making a difference on two main levels. Writing can make a difference personally, and it can make a difference politically, even planet-wide.

I believe I am a writer because writing makes a difference. I discovered how it could make a personal difference first, when I was in grade school and began writing in diaries and journals.

What I noticed, as I filled diary pages with teenage angst, is that something happened inside me when I poured my experiences and emotions out onto a blank page. It was a great relief for me to do this. It vented my emotions, helped me clarify my thoughts, guided me through difficult decisions, worked out conflicts. Writing made a difference to me by helping me understand the world and better understand myself. And so it became very important to me to be able to write.

I learned later that much of the writing that had helped me with life's struggles is a type called "expressive writing." This is where you write about some sort of emotional upheaval or trauma, not only recounting what's happened to you, but also writing how you feel about it, letting go and pouring out your deepest emotions.

What I say about it here comes largely from the work of researcher James Pennebaker. It turns out this kind of writing makes an actual physiological difference for us that has been measured scientifically. Expressive writing is good for our health -- it enhances our immune systems, it can decrease blood pressure, reduce sleep disturbances, decrease chronic pain, improve lung function in asthma patients, boost working memory, and reduce stress.

The process of writing about emotional upheaval can be upsetting or saddening as you do it, and immediately afterward. But generally this sadness lifts after a short time – sometimes a matter of minutes – and longer-term effects of well-being set in.

I've experienced this, and my experiences of feeling better after writing got me hooked on the process. As that happened, I began exploring ways to do more of it. Early on, I wrote for school newspapers, and in college, started getting paid for some of my writing.

Speaking at Finlandia. Taken by reporter Layla Aslani, this photo accompanied the news article about The Writer's Journey in The Daily Mining Gazette.

I soon learned that writing for money is a very different process from expressing oneself in a journal, and it is not necessarily as healthy. It brings up a lot of self-criticism, self-doubt, and fears of rejection or judgment from others, and all that in itself can be very traumatizing. So then you have to use expressive writing to get over the trauma!

But when you write for money, and for an audience, you do get into the second way that writing makes a difference: it makes a difference in the broader world as an advocacy tool.

From very early on I had a desire to make the world a better place, and I had strong opinions about how to do that. So I really liked making a difference by using writing as an advocacy tool.

There's a type of writing I've done a lot of professionally which is now sometimes called advocacy journalism. I guess you could define this as nonfiction reporting but with more of a point of view than you'd find in a mainstream newspaper.

One example is an article I wrote for my college paper, one of the very first articles for which I was paid. It's about a food coop that was new in our college town and needed help to keep going. In that article I was both telling the story about the coop, and gently encouraging people to get involved.

Another example comes from the middle of my writer's journey, when I wrote a lot for regional and national magazines. One of my magazine articles was about green cosmetics, and again, it's both informative and encouraging of green cosmetics as a better choice.

A third example comes from a more recent stage in my writer's journey, when I wrote a book called Divorce Your Car! The subtitle, Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile, tells you what that book advocates, but I should also make clear that the book is not about wiping cars off the face of the planet – it is really about changing the relationship we have with cars.

I'm fortunate to have gotten some positive reviews for Divorce Your Car!, and my very favorite was a review that said the book is "not as biased as the title makes it sound." And this is my way of making a segue into another kind of writing I've done.

In writing non-fiction, I've also written straight journalism, where I am careful to stick to reportable facts and keep my own opinion out of the writing – an example of that would be the series on climate change in the Lake Superior basin that I wrote for Keweenaw Now in 2007. This kind of writing can also make a difference, simply by raising people's awareness.

To finish, I'd like to share one compelling experience I had, shortly after Divorce Your Car! came out. I was on the west coast in the middle of a car-free book tour, where I traveled to interviews and bookstore readings by bus and train and folding bicycle. I had just finished a reading at a bookstore in Bellingham, Washington, and an older woman came up to me and said very simply, "Thank you for writing this. Your book changed my life." I was so floored that I didn't know what to say. I think we did chat a bit more, but I don't remember what we said. What's seared on my memory is the visual image of her standing there in the bookstore when she said those words. I felt both very humbled and very honored. I am lucky to have had this kind of experience more than once.

So even though the ideal world I envision is not yet out there, I know that writing makes a difference. Whether it's deeply emotional journal writing, or advocacy writing, or straight non-fiction, or even humor, I firmly believe this, and I hope you will find, whether you read or write or both, that writing can make a difference for you.

Adding a New Direction

2008-10-23T10:38:00.002-04:00

I'm adding another facet to my career, and how it might fit under my byline is still evolving. Not long ago I signed up for an online nutrition course with the Global College of Natural Medicine. The program leads to certification in nutritional consulting, the goal being to make me more "expert" at providing information about food, eating and health (not that I haven't been doing this already! ask my family members, who for the last few decades have put up with my pronouncements about the virtues of B vitamins. As my sister Adrienne said when I told her I'd signed up for the program, "Duh, Kate! What took you so long?!").

The first assignment I took on within this self-paced curriculum is a Mini-Course called "Writing for Publication." Very fun to go back to beginner's mind and write from a new angle. Although, really, it's not totally new: I've done a little food writing in the past; writing about nutrition can fit neatly under the umbrella of science writing; and penning articles about holistic health dovetails nicely with environmental journalism, writing about nature and sustainability. So no matter how much I end up providing nutritional advice, I'll still be writing.

Right now I'm drafting a piece on cell phones and health, looking at how the close exposures to electromagnetic radiation from cell phone use might affect our needs for certain nutrients. A preliminary conclusion: I'm glad I never started using a cell phone. A link that can tell you more is at:

http://www.environmentaloncology.org/node/201
(University of Pittsburgh Cancer Center's concerns about cell phones, with ten precautionary recommendations)

Water Wars

2008-04-11T15:47:00.002-04:00

Growing up in northern California, I was not unfamiliar with water wars. My father told us tales about Owens Valley farmers who bombed the canals that later shipped water to Los Angeles from Owens Lake, draining it dry in 13 years. My grandfather, an impressionable teen from Sacramento at the time of the bombings, lived in California all his long life, but refused ever to set foot in water-grabbing L.A.

This introduced me to the volatility and complexity of water conflicts, a theme that former Newsweek reporter Peter Annin echoes in his excellent book, The Great Lakes Water Wars. Water tensions are on the rise, Annin writes. As demand for water outstrips supply in arid western North America, industrializing Asia, and other water-short regions, the Great Lakes will feel increasing pressure from proponents of diversions from this huge supply of the world's fresh surface water.

Water diversion projects have a history of disastrous results, as Annin illustrates by describing the fate of the shrunken Aral Sea. So Great Lakes decision makers have justification for making efforts to limit diversions, as they have done most recently with a Compact signed in 2005. With growing demand for water worldwide, will these efforts be enough to protect the Great Lakes? The stakes are high and it remains an open question, making Annin's book an important read for everyone in North America.

Ironically, the same Great Lakes water that many want for drinking also carries contaminants. That's pointed out by another important book about the Great Lakes that has worldwide implications: Melvin Visser's Cold, Clear and Deadly. This volume focuses on persistent organic pollutants (POPs), chlorinated chemicals now banned in the U.S. but still used in the developing world. POPs used anywhere can go airborne and travel the world; air circulation patterns carry them poleward, depositing them in cold water bodies like Lake Superior and the Arctic Ocean. From there, they move into the food chain and wreak biological havoc, disrupting reproduction as well as causing birth defects and neurological problems.

Visser's fascinating tale tells of his evolution from chemical engineer in the pharmaceutical industry -- he graduated from Michigan Tech and worked many years for Upjohn -- to an advocate of a complete global ban on the persistent organic pollutants with which he once worked. There's conflict and tension in Visser's book, too, as he writes about this other kind of "war" affecting the water supply: the debate over production and use of chlorinated chemicals.

These books came up in discussions last month at Michigan Tech as the campus celebrated World Water Day. As a lead-in, the student chapter of Engineers Without Borders held a Popcorn and Policy panel on Great Lakes Water issues. On World Water Day, March 24th, MTU hosted two excellent lectures, with Peter Annin discussing Great Lakes Water Wars, and Jay Austin from University of Minnesota, Duluth, who explained the recent finding of a surprisingly rapid rise in Lake Superior's surface temperature. The links in the right-hand column under "Lake Superior Basin Climate Change Series" include more about Austin's research.

A Little Background

2008-03-09T00:05:00.000-05:00

Nature, environment, energy, food, wine, health, business, travel, and transportation: those are the topics I've been writing about since the late 1970s. My byline's appeared in a variety of periodicals including the Boston Globe, Keweenaw Now(online), Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Sonoma Index-Tribune, Upper Peninsula Post, E Magazine, Grist Magazine(online), Northern Lights, Orion Afield, Urban Ecologist, Utne Reader, Wild Earth, and others. I'm also the author of Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile, and have published a smattering of poetry and short prose in west coast literary periodicals -- but the latter are topics for different blogs. This one features non-fiction, and ranges a bit into my teaching, speaking, and editing.

Lately, I've written a lot about climate -- and yes, global climate is changing. Check out my series on climate change in the Lake Superior basin, which won the 2007 Science Journalism Award for Online Reporting from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The series appeared last spring and summer on the terrific local news site, www.KeweenawNow.com (now http://keweenawnow.blgspot.com). You'll find links to the three articles in the series on the right side of this page.