Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Knowing All Nature’s ‘Moods and Manners’)

“I seek acquaintance with nature to know all her moods and manners. Primitive nature is the most interesting to me. I take infinitive pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and, then, to my chagrin I hear that is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know the entire heaven and an entire earth. All the great trees, and beasts, fishes and fowls are gone.” —American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), journal entry for Mar. 23, 1856, in The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861 (2009)

PBS is giving Thoreau the same treatment it gave Ernest Hemingway a few years ago: a three-part documentary by Ken Burns, starting tonight. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this Transcendentalist as naturalist and protest figure.

Hailed by youth in the 1960s, Thoreau may be experiencing an even greater groundswell of interest now. Let’s hope so.

Quote of the Day (Holmes Rolston III, on Paradoxical Attitudes Towards Nature)

“Nature is wilderness yet paradise, demonic yet divine, asset yet enemy, jungle yet garden, harsh yet healing, means for man yet end in itself, commodity yet community, the land provoking man's virility yet evoking his sentimentality.”—American philosopher, Templeton Prize winner, and “pioneer of environmental ethics” Holmes Rolston III (1932-2025), “Philosophical Aspects of the Environment” (1973)

The image of Holmes Rolston III that accompanies this post was taken Apr. 4, 2008, by David Keller.

Quote of the Day (Robert Kennedy, on ‘Common Qualities of Conscience and Indignation’)

"There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve to death in the streets of India; a former Prime Minister is summarily executed in the Congo; intellectuals go to jail in Russia; and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the world. These are different evils; but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows; they mark the limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings throughout the world. And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.”— U.S. Attorney General, Senator from New York, and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), “Speech at the University of Capetown, South Africa, Day of Affirmation,” June 6, 1966

In his eulogy two years after this address, Ted Kennedy told the mourners in St. Patrick’s Cathedral that his murdered brother “need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life.” 

At least to some extent, the documentary record about Camelot and the cries of scandal-mongers alike ensured for our skeptical age that Robert Kennedy would indeed escape this fate. He could be the most complicated mixture imaginable of idealism and steely-eyed, brass-knuckle determination in pursuit of a goal.

Even so, and despite realizing that a yawning gap frequently exists between words and performance, I couldn’t read the above excerpt from his Capetown address (also known as the “Ripple of Hope” speech) without feeling that something immense was lost when he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet in Los Angeles after winning the 1968 California primary for President.

At some level, the words of politicians do matter. Even when using talented speechwriters, what they choose to say (or not) conveys what they regard as important and indicates some measure of their character.

Kennedy’s words in particular reflect an elevated tone befitting the magnitude of worldwide issues, a responsibility for alleviating “the imperfections of human justice.”

That gravitas, I’m sorry to say, is missing in today’s discourse. You can call this diminished rhetoric a casualty of a Sixties decade that didn’t achieve its lofty goals, of more than a half century of advertising sound bites that left listeners unable to absorb sustained arguments, or of the countless casual cruelties and callousness of Donald Trump.

But it was gone at both parties’ conventions this summer. Forget about that “When they go low, we go high” cry of the Democrats eight years ago. Just think of Barack Obama’s hand gesture to simulate Trump’s obsession with crowd size.

My sadness increased when I heard today that Robert Kennedy Jr. would be suspending his independent campaign and backing Trump for President. It would take a psychiatrist to plumb all the depths and traumas that led the son of the martyred Democratic candidate of the late Sixties to this decisive point in his own misbegotten Presidential race.

But it only takes an ordinary moral sensibility to know that the candidate who won his endorsement not only did not measure up to the job that Robert Sr. sought and Jack Kennedy achieved, but that he corroded the dignity of the Oval Office, widened the gap between rich and poor, and encouraged the forces of evil at home and abroad.

Robert Sr.’s Capetown address—one of the most famous in his short career—inspired inhabitants of Africa—a continent that Trump has dubbed, together with Haiti and El Salvador, as “s—thole countries.”

It is even more astonishing to realize that the crusade that Robert Jr. conducted so fervently these last couple of decades—conservation—was abandoned and utterly forgotten in his support for a former President whose administration took 74 actions that weakened environmental protection, according to an August 2020 Brookings Institution study.

Twenty years ago this month, Robert Jr. published Crimes Against Nature, a polemic with the most pointed of subtitles: “How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy.” If he felt this way about Dubya, then what on earth did he think Trump was doing in his term in office?

In bowing out, he noted that Trump had “asked to enlist me in his administration.” Assume that he does get tapped for such a position. How long do you think before, like so many others who agreed to serve the Former Guy, he awakens one morning to find via X that he’s been fired?

Robert Kennedy Sr. brought conscience with his indignation to the problems of the world and his country. His namesake forgot the conscience part.

His latest choice has dismayed members of his immediate family, who issued a statement rightly denouncing his endorsement as “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.” They understood better than their brother that their father appealed to the best instincts of humanity in general and his countrymen in particular, while Trump has never missed a chance to call forth the ugliest of both. 

But RFK Jr. has also disappointed the millions of Americans who like Robert Sr. have hoped to “wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.” Those sufferings will only increase because of the side with which he's thrown in his lot.

Quote of the Day (Simon Kuper, on Climate Change’s Impact on European Summers)

“Since the heatwaves of 2019, summer has morphed from something to crave into something to fear. Europe, which is heating twice as fast as the global average, had its hottest ever summer in 2022, breaking the record set in 2021 — all of which was before the world re-entered the hotter El Niño climate cycle. No beach is fun at 40C with wildfires on the horizon.”—Journalist Simon Kuper, “How Will Climate Change Affect the Holiday Map?” The Financial Times, July 1-2, 2023

Will this go down as the summer when Planet Earth finally awakens to the threat of climate change, when voters finally demand that politicians stop denying its existence and start spelling out what they’ll do about it?

If only!

Even so, it is remarkable the extent to which there are few places on this planet—and, more to the point, few places in the United States—that are not affected by the rising heat and humidity. Statistics don’t persuade people of much, but maybe TV footage of relatives—or, God forbid, direct experience with the consequences of a climate in the midst of a perfect storm of factors—might convince some.

At some point, I’d like to write an analysis that, jigsaw-like, puts all the pieces of together from different parts of the globe to depict what’s happening. But Simon Kuper’s recent column that I quoted from above illuminates, in concise form, what is happening in Europe.

I didn’t know until I read him, for instance, that a particularly popular European pastime—sunbathing on the French Riviera—was invented 100 years ago this summer by Gerald and Sara Murphy, the models for the expatriate couple at the heart of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night.

Nor, until I read Kuper, had I thought of how unbearable temperatures could alter European tourism patterns—and have a direct (and more often than not, unhappy) effect on this element of the continent’s economy.

The image accompanying this post is based on a 2022 European Investment Bank survey, showing an even wider implication of climate change: that more than a quarter of Europeans believe they may need to move to another region because of the phenomenon.

From my childhood, I distinctly recall a margarine commercial with the tagline, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” But for at least the past couple of decades, in our refusal to face up to climate change, Americans have been the fools, not the other way around. 

Maybe now, as we survey the damage, we can only hope that clown time is over.

Quote of the Day (Wallace Stegner, on the Arid West, No Longer an American Eden)

“The next stage after boom is bust. Again. What should one make of facts as depressing as these? What do such facts [on growing aridity] do to the self-gratifying image of the West as the home of freedom, independence, largeness, spaciousness, and of the Westerner as total self-reliance on a white stallion? I confess they make this Westerner yearn for the old days on the Milk and the Missouri when those rivers ran free, and we were trying to learn how to live with the country, and the country seemed both hard and simple, and the world and I were young, when irrigation had not yet grown beyond its legitimate bounds and the West provided for its thin population a hard living but a wonderful life. Sad to say, they make me admit, when I face them, that the West is no more the Eden that I once thought it than the Garden of the World that the boosters and engineers tried to make it; and that neither nostalgia nor boosterism can any longer make a case for it as the geography of hope.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American fiction writer, historian, and essayist Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), “Striking the Rock,” originally published as “The Spoiling of the American West” in Michigan Quarterly Review, Spring 1987, republished in Wallace Stegner’s West, edited by Page Stegner (2008)

Wallace Stegner, who died 30 years ago today in Santa Fe, N.M., from injuries suffered in an auto accident, would have had a secure place in the American West for having founded and directed for 25 years the Stanford Creative Writing Program, an institution where he helped guide the likes of Larry McMurtry, Evan Connell, Scott Turow, Robert Stone, and Ken Kesey.

A more durable claim to fame would be his own 35 published books, often set in the West. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angle of Repose, but I am fond of one of his last novels, Crossing to Safety, a poignant study of two marriages and the complicated friendships that ensue.

Much of Stegner’s work is a meditation on the past. But, in reading the passage above, I felt that he had journeyed from history to prophecy. 

In examining how “the unrestrained engineering of Western water” became the region’s “original sin,” Stegner came to see—decades sooner than our current news reports of acres of wildfires—that irrigation— a seeming boon to population and commerce— could end up undermining both.

For more information on how this has manifested itself in recent years, I urge you to read Sarah Bates’ National Wildlife Federation (NWF) Blog from two years ago on “Fire, Water and Our Public Lands,” or watch this week’s PBS “Nova” episode, “Weathering the Future.”

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on a ‘Tolerable Planet’)

"What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? — If you cannot tolerate the planet that it is on?"— American essayist, naturalist and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) in a letter to Harrison Blake, May 20, 1860, in Familiar Letters, edited by F. B. Sanborn (1865)

Song Lyric of the Day (Joni Mitchell, on the ‘Little Left of Wild Eden Earth’)

 “And everyone's a victim!
Nobody's hands are clean.
There's so very little left of wild Eden Earth
So near the jaws of our machines.” — Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, printed as the poem “Bad Dreams Are Good” in The New Yorker, Sept. 17, 2007, and as the song “Bad Dreams” from her CD Shine (2007)

(The photo of Ms. Mitchell accompanying this post came from an Asylum Records ad from 1974.)

Quote of the Day (Bill McKibben, on Climate Change, ‘The Fight of Our Time’)

“If we do not solve this problem soon, we will not solve it. We are called upon to act with all that we have. It is the fight of our time — and we need you.”—Environmental author-activist Bill McKibben, on climate change, quoted in Jamie Landers, “Bill McKibben Calls for Individual Action and Collective Climate Change Reversal,” The  Chautauquan Daily, Aug. 15, 2019

At the moment, many would say that the coronavirus pandemic is “the fight of our time”—and I’m not sure I would quarrel with that assessment.

But I strongly believe that climate change has this in common with COVID-19: It is an emergency waiting to happen, a perfect storm resulting from authoritarian instincts that smother inconvenient bad news, our country’s unwillingness to make prudent investments that might stave off disaster, and—I might as well say it—a President who scoffs at science and even elementary facts while turning a real but by means insoluble problem into a massive catastrophe that didn’t have to happen. And it has similar potential to create a Darwinian struggle in which the haves are far, far more likely to survive than the have-nots.

Take a look around at all the people wearing masks today. In the not-so-distant future, given that President’s attitude toward the environment—and his diehard followers’ swallowing of nearly every word he says—it is not at all inconceivable that those masks may come into use again, even after this particular pandemic subsides, if our air becomes too polluted to breathe.

Quote of the Day (Joyce Carol Oates, Imagining the Climate-Change Apocalypse)

“When they moved from West Seventy-Eighth street and Columbus Avenue to Hazelton-on-Hudson, in 1991, the air in the Hudson Valley was cleaner, the sky was a brighter and clearer blue–Luce is certain. The white oaks and birches did not shed their leaves prematurely, in September. That maddening chemical odor wasn't borne on the wind, and the soil on Vedders Hill seemed more solid, substantial. Mudslides were unknown, as were firestorms. An excess of pollen was a far more serious problem than a depletion of ozone was. True, there were reports of acid rain in the Adirondacks, and the Hudson River had been heavily polluted, like Lakes Ontario and Erie, upstate, but the media didn't make a fuss over it, and social media, that vehicle for channelling outrage, did not yet exist. Everyone sailed, canoed, kayaked on the Hudson River. Fished! The river's steely beauty prevailed.” — Joyce Carol Oates, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” The New Yorker, Oct. 14, 2019

This past weekend, on Meet the Press, the panelists, asked to list the most important stories of the last decade, named climate change as number two. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who listed it as number one, explained her reasoning: “What are they going to say 50 years from now? And am I going to be right, 50 years from now?...If we're not taking a leadership role in this, the generations to come will know that we failed.”

That failure hangs heavily over “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which takes its title from the infamous 1741 sermon by Jonathan Edwards sermon. But, while the Congregationalist minister conjured up a personal and collective calling to account for assorted sins, the prolific fiction writer Joyce Carol Oates imagines an environmental catastrophe visited upon her characters, Luce and Andrew.

Not only is the circle of friends of this New York couple decimated by cancers before their time, but the two of them, gripped by confusion, anxiety and fear, grow more emotionally distant from each other, unable to express their emotions to each other. At the climax of the story, death is present not only outside the couple’s home, in the form of a raging firestorm, but inside, through the stricken fellow musicians in Luce’s “Little Quartet”: “Wheelchairs, walkers, canes. Little knitted caps on (bald) heads. A contingent of chemotherapy’s walking wounded.”

“Accusing others of ‘catastrophizing,’ even as the world is disintegrating and one’s own health has become tenuous, is a form of denial in which most/many of us indulge daily,” Oates explained in an interview with The New Yorker. Through fiction, she brings readers face to face with our ongoing individual and collective failure of environmental responsibility. 

The astonishingly prolific Oates has occasionally written horror stories, but I can’t imagine that she has written anything more terrifying than this grim tale. It gives powerful narrative form to the epic ecological change noted by J. R. McNeill in Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century: 

“With our new powers we banished some historical constraints on health and population, food production, energy use, and consumption generally….[I]n  banishing them we invited other constraints in the form of the planet's capacity to absorb the wastes, by-products, and impacts of our actions. These latter constraints had pinched occasionally in the past, but only locally. By the end of the twentieth century they seemed to restrict our options globally.”

(Photograph of Ms. Oates ©Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 4.0 at the 2014 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, Oct. 25, 2014.)

This Day in Environmental History (Flood Control Act of 1938)

June 28, 1938—Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1938, authorizing civil engineering projects such as dams, levees, dikes and other flood control measures. 

The bill also gave the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) the authority to acquire land for flood control, while stipulating that the ACE limit construction. 

Other, more significant events occurred on June 28 in American history, notably the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision. But given the enormous tragedy that has occurred recently with Midwest flooding, I thought that flood control seemed like an unusually timely topic—not to mention one that’s little understood. 

The first fact that took me by surprise in researching this subject was that, unlike other pieces of legislation—Social Security, say—no one date stands out from any other in this area. In fact, the Flood Control Act needed a specific year attached to its name because at one point, one act of this type was being passed annually or biannually from 1917 through the next 25 years. 

Congress was first prompted to act concerning flooding in 1874, with an act providing for relief work after a severe flood along the Mississippi. Even the Johnstown Flood of 1889, which claimed more than 2,200 lives, did not prompt federal intervention in this area. Whatever legislation could be produced had to be justified as improving navigation rather than enhancing flood control, because of the constitutional scruples of a number of Congressmen. (What? Constitutional scruples? Congress? Did I hear you correctly?)

But floods along the Mississippi in 1912 and 1913 exposed the fallacy of the belief that the states were the best actors to handle this. In March 1917, partly as a result, Congress passed the first federal flood control legislation. It took the great Mississippi flood of 1927, however—a disaster which saw the Red Cross caring for almost 600,000 at one point—for the ACE to become convinced that levees alone would not prevent these disasters, but rather levees, floodways and spillways working together. 

With its belief in government and major projects, such as TVA—and particularly with the President’s interest in all matters environmental—the Roosevelt administration made flood control an even more urgent part of its overall program. The 1936 Flood Control Act, the real beginning of comprehensive federal flood control work, now stated explicitly that flood control was a "proper activity of the Federal Government in cooperation with States, their political subdivisions, and localities thereof." 

And, giving a further jab at those who wanted to limit federal interference in what had once been a state prerogative, the 1938 act listed recreation as one of the areas that the ACE should consider in planning these projects. Among the major projects shepherded into existence by this law was Center Hill in Tennessee, Mud Mountain Dam near Seattle, and Deer Creek Lake in Ohio (pictured). 

Disaster relief has become one of the areas most affected by federal government policy and administration. Because of the large numbers of people affected by Hurricane Katrina and the more recent flooding, I’m sure that, no matter which party wins this November, we’re likely to see greater federal supervision in this area. It’s likely to affect even more aspects of how people live—from insurance they get for their properties all the way to whether they will even be allowed to build in flood-prone areas.