“I HAVE to do this: believe that there is the possibility of reconstitution. I have to be sure of the fact that there will always be those who are already engaged and can be joined, so no one has to go it alone.” Such were the thoughts on my hike last week, when assaulted by the heat and the views of so many oak trees either diseased, or dying, or dead.
The grasses will recover.
So will the wild blackberries, although the fruit dried on the wine, hard little balls of no use to perusing wildlife.
The trees, though, are suffering.
Eventually I made it to sturgeon lake, now just a puddle. Small California sunflowers lined the shores where there is usually water, a golden band screaming: beauty!
The herons and egrets joined the pelicans, some of them roosting in the trees behind the water.
A flock of Western sandpipers, really a murmuration, undulated as a cloud in the air, and looked like blossoms on a tree, in a particular spot. They were miraculous, shimmering, moving hard in the hot air. They are difficult to photograph and to detect, just look closely.
I had to sit down in a shady spot twice during a hike that I used to do briskly, without any sense of fatigue then. Yet, I am still hiking. I am still casting my lot with those who love nature and try to raise consciousness about the climate crisis. I still believe change is possible. And the birds still signal wonder.
Music today is the same mix of sadness and resilience that colored this week – from Poland with decidedly Jewish melodies perfect for the upcoming High Holidays, I’ve been listening intently.
History connects the dots of our identity, and our identity was all but obliterated. Our land was taken, our language was forbidden. Our stories, our history, were almost forgotten. What land, language, and identity remains is derived from our cultural and historic sites . . . . Sites of cultural and historic significance are important to us because they are a spiritual connection to our ancestors. Even if we do not have access to all such sites, their existence perpetuates the connection. When such a site is destroyed, the connection is lost.
-Chairman Dave Archambault, II, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe
***
The minute when temperatures dropped last week I went for a bit of gallery hopping, early enough in the day that they were all empty. Nothing much to report until I entered Russo Lee Gallery, drawn by Ghosts in the Machine, an exhibition title that spiked my interest. I associate that phrase with British philosopher Gilbert Ryle who coined it to describe the mind/body dualism of Descartes and subsequent philosophers. Ryle picked apart the notion, held since Descartes’ time, that the mind is separable from the body (the ghost and the machine, respectively.) Why would an artist be interested in tackling a controversy that has been long since settled in psychological science? Maybe an allusion to the connection between materials used and concepts expressed?
I was way off – what else is new. The show’s title refers to a recruiting video from the U.S. military to attract attention to its psychological operations division. Watch it here, the selling of psychological warfare is perturbing, to say the least. Creepy, more likely.
According to native-American artist Ka’ila Farrell-Smith (Klamath/Modoc), the art work on view is conceptually linked to he surveillance state, one that uses all kinds of control mechanisms to pursue its goals, including squashing resistance to the extraction and transportation of fossil fuels and other minerals desired by industry. A deeper window into her reasoning can be found on her website in a letter to Sen. Jeff Merkley that outlines her stand as an activist as well as an artist.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine at Russo Lee Gallery
Looking at her work at Russo Lee Gallery, I was taken by multiple aspects of the gray scale paintings. Some interesting visuals, some probing conceptual issues, and some imporrtant questions raised by her exposition. Visuals first: the 21 or so paintings of this body of work use repeat patterns, created by a constrained range of colors and found objects used as stencils that anchor the gaze. They have sharply defined contours and a lot of contrast that the eye is drawn to, in juxtaposition to the hazy, floating color fields that are sprayed and enhance a sense of depth, with occasional hand-drawn patterns alleviating the impact of rigid man-made machinery. They all superficially resemble each other and it takes a while for the variability underneath to emerge – I’ll get back to why that might matter in just a bit.
They also exhibit hints of pink here and there, flags of resilience in a black and white world, beautifully arranged. One of the stencils is amorphous enough that it could be a more biological form, rather than the strict geometry of circles and grids, alluding to the ghost perhaps, and assigned a central role in the smaller paintings.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine 006 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
Before you learn even more, these paintings do capture a sense of unease, increased by the disorientation introduced by the many overlapping layers, creating fragmented space. This apprehension is growing when you realize that the pigments are augmented by lithium-infused earth that the artist collected in her travels along the Oregon border and Nevada, site of the struggle over one of the largest lithium mines in this country.
Under the Trump administration, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management fast-tracked and approved Lithium Nevada Corp.’s new mine at Thacker Pass (Peehee Mu’Huh) near the Oregon border, 200 miles northeast of Reno, NV, and close to the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Indian Reservation. The Biden Administration has given its support for the extraction project, a cornerstone of its clean energy plans to combat climate change. Mining at Thacker Pass would provide lithium for more than 1.5 million electric vehicles per year for 40 years, claims the company.
Conservationists and adjacent tribal nations have gone to court against the project, on grounds of destroyed habitat for imperiled sage grouse, pronghorn antelope and other species in violation of environmental laws and fearing catastrophic groundwater pollution. In addition, the mine will destroy lands sacred to tribal members, site of a massacre in 1865 that killed many of their ancestors. A month ago, on July 17, 2023, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave the final green light for Lithium Nevada Corp. to go forward with construction, ignoring the claims and concerns of the people most affected by the rupture in the land, ruling against their interests.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine 004/019 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel. Detail on Left.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine 003 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
Some of Farrell-Smith’s paintings allude to this concrete situation, with the chemical notation for lithium – LI – in some of them, or the native-American name for Thacker Pass found in others (Peehee Mu’Huh). But the work, for me, poses a larger question, or actually two of them. For one, why has the U.S. not adjusted its mining law from 1872, a law that precluded options for environmental protection needs or negotiating Indian interests. Secondly, and difficult to answer, what do you do if the overall imperative for societies to combat the effects of the climate crisis conflicts with the needs and demands of some of its constituent groups, continuing a historic pattern of violating their rights?
Here are some facts of the legal history (I am summarizing what I learned here.) Mineral exploration on public lands is governed by the General Mining Law of 1872, which makes “all valuable mineral deposits” in public lands “free and open to exploration.” It used to be gold and silver mining that polluted water and destroyed the land. Now companies are after the so-called “green” metals, lithium, cobalt, copper and rare earth elements used in electric vehicles and other clean energy applications. And of course the return to visions of nuclear power has uranium miners surface again.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine 020 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
The law still allows claimants to pay an annual maintenance fee of $165 per claim in order to keep it active. Claimants – mostly multination corporation – can pull unlimited quantities of minerals from their claims without paying a cent of royalties to the minerals’ actual owner, the American public. The law contains no environmental provisions and no reclamation requirements, so corporations can simply walk away from their mines once they’re no longer profitable, leaving the rest of us to pay for Superfund clean-ups. Here are the numbers:
11.36 million Acres of public land staked with active mining claims at the end of the 2022 fiscal year. This is a 932,000-acre increase from the previous year.
228,696 Number of active mining claims covering nearly 6 million acres of federal land in Nevada at the end of FY 2021.
267,535 Number of active mining claims on federal land in Nevada as of June 12, 2023, an increase of nearly 40,000 in just 18 months.
13 Minimum number of active mining claims staked within Bears Ears National Monument since 2016. These claims were located either in the months just before the national monument was established, or after it had been shrunk by then-President Donald Trump but before President Joe Biden restored the boundaries. National monument status bars new mining claims, but does not affect existing ones like these.
$34.4 billion Value of non-fuel mineral production in 2019 on all lands in 12 Western states.
Unknown Amount of that mineral production extracted from federal lands. The number is unknown because federal agencies do not track production. Earthworks, a mining watchdog group, has estimated that $2 billion to $3 billion worth of minerals is extracted from public lands annually.
12.5% to 18.75% Royalty rate on oil, natural gas and coal extracted from public lands.
$14.8 billion Royalties paid on oil and gas production from federal lands in 2022.
$0 Royalties paid on hardrock minerals extracted from mining claims on public land, including copper, gold, silver, lithium, uranium and various “green metals,” between 1872 and 2023.
SOURCES: Bureau of Land Management, Government Accountability Office, Congressional Research Service, Earthworks, Center for American Progress
Note that about 75% of all lithium deposits are on or near tribal land. The conundrum is, of course, that not only the financial goals of the mining operations once again subjugates native-American interests. For me the bigger question is how do you weigh a planet’s need to get away from fossil fuel consumption against the clear damages done to tribal rights? Particularly when it is not even clear how much electric cars are really a net improvement for the environment, given the issues of water consumption during battery production and the lack of safe disposal strategies. Or how much the concept of “let’s build electric cars” distracts from the needs to fundamentally curb driving and flying and transporting goods long distance or stop producing unnecessary consumer goods en masse?
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine Details from various exhibits (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
The International Institute for Sustainable Development stated last year: “Lands inhabited by Indigenous Peoples contain 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity… Many Indigenous Peoples are at the frontlines of resisting the drivers of the global environmental crisis. Yet, international and national policies and laws do not recognize and support their collective rights.”
In our own country, those laws hark back to the Supreme Court’s adoption of the Doctrine of Discovery in 1873, in a case, Johnson v. M’Intosh, where it was decided that Tribal Nations could no longer claim legal title to their own lands as their “rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, [were] necessarily diminished.” Natives could not be left “in possession of their country” because they were “fierce savages whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest.” As a result, “[t]o leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness”—that is, land that is not commercially exploited or colonially conquered in the name of what was then viewed to be American progress.(Ref.) This is still standing law. Some environmental laws started to emerge in the 1970s and have managed to improve the protection of endangered species, with endangerment or extinction measurable consequences of mining. These laws, however, have not managed to include into their canon the inherent sovereign right of Tribal Nations to protect the lands that contain their sacred sites and the remains of the relatives. These are intangible, cultural values that were simply not taken seriously enough to be fought for by non-tribal movements.
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ghosts in the Machine Left to Right 009/010/017 (2022-2023) Northern Paiute lithium topsoil, acrylics, aerosols, and graphite on panel.
How, then, is the disturbance of sacred ancestral land and defiance of cultural and religious traditions, all in the name of resource extraction to further a “green” agenda (and the profits from it,) in any way different from traditional colonial exploits? I had mentioned at the beginning that Farrell-Smiths paintings superficially resemble each other quite a bit given the constrained set of colors and stencils. I feel that that in itself is a perfect metaphor for what has been done to indigenous interests: over and over and over again we see the same pattern of usurping land and harming cultural or historic sites, with slightly shifting justifications for the destruction of tribal sovereignty. Then it was the Doctrine of Discovery aimed to ban “savages” and “heathens” from standing in the way of “progress,” now it is the dire need for combating climate catastrophe on the backs of those who were perennial stewards of the land to begin with. What gives?
The work is up until the beginning of September – check it out!
“I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” — Samuel Beckett, “The Unnamable.”
In a recent interview Rebecca Solnit talked about hope amid the climate chaos. She defined the term: “Hope, for me, is just recognizing that the future is being decided to some extent in the present, and what we do matters because of that reality.” She added the observation, “many people are very good at imagining everything falling apart, everything getting worse; they’re good at dystopia, they’re bad at utopia.” Sometimes, I thought, a word of consolation would help, rather than the exhortation for all of us to try even harder during times when despair sets in. The thought was probably triggered by my current reading – I came across the interview while starting a recent book by Michael Ignatieff, The Art of Consolation. How to find solace in dark times. (The link gives you an excerpt of the preface.)
I had liked Ignatieff’s brilliant biography of Isaiah Berlin, but am currently irritated, two chapters into these meditations, about his devotion to religious attempts at consolation with the imperative to just accept the unknowable. No takers for “all has a hidden meaning – only a higher power knows” on this end here. The chapters are organized around a summary and analysis, ordered along a historical time line, of famous people’s dealing with catastrophe and defining forms of consolation, a veritable gallery of the broken and bereaved, as a clever review in The Guardian phrased it. More skeptical review in the NYT here.
Maybe I am just currently irritated in general. Who knows.
In any case, I thought it would be interesting to find some examples of visual representations of consolation. How do you visually translate the moment when we attempt to help someone reverse or shift despair into something more resembling a somewhat normal life, if not hope? The moment when someone or something opens a perspective towards this shift, providing a sense that it is possible, or probable, or even guaranteed that life will be easier to bear at some point?
The search resulted in a mix. It arches from representations of the texts that governed the belief systems of different eras to impressionistic paintings that captured the human interaction associated with comforting, from mannerist paintings to some modern photography. What is art and what is Kitsch I leave to the eye of the beholder.
I’ll start with miniatures from TheGetty relating to Boethius’ Consolation de Philosophie, around1460-70. The Roman philosopher’s book was the most read in Europe after the bible. It contains “a dialogue between its author and the personification of Philosophy, in prison while awaiting trial for treason. Discussing the problem of evil and the conflict between free will and divine providence, Philosophy explains the changeable nature of Fortune and consoles Boethius in his adversity.”
There is Munch, there is always Edvard Munch, who we can count on.
Edvard Munch Consolation (1894)
Compare:
PDX photographer, now based in Brooklyn, Olivia BeeConsolation (2020.)
Any thoughts? And what to make of the image (“Consolation”) of a fetus…. at the center of the exhibition Colpo di Folmine (Struck by Lightning) by Dutch photographer Arno Massee?
I, personally, find solace in the somewhat sarcastic poetry of Heinrich Heine, who, in 1832, reminds a woman staring at the sea with setting sun, that the sun will rise again….translated by no other than Emma Lazarus!
Here is one of Kaspar David Friedrich’s back views, alternatingly titled: Woman in front of the setting sun, Sunset, Sunrise, Morning Sun, Woman in the morning sun. No sea in sight, but the solace of a world still turning. That’s my kind of consolation. Then again, that painting might also be a premonition of a burning planet due to unending fossil fuel consumption – wouldn’t you know it, despair is here to stay.
Walk with me. This time on the northern side of the Columbia River, at Catherine Creek. It is a beautiful short loop offering wide vistas to the East and West along the river, as well as impressive cliffs on the southern side straight across from where you hike.
Plenty of wildflowers around, the annual explosion of poppies,
bachelors’ buttons (in German “grain flower” or Kornblume, since it used to grow at the borders of the wheat fields,) immediately catching your attention.
Buckwheat, fork-toothed ookow and cream bush abound, intermixed with dill and bindweed.
Swathes of sweet peas.
Then there are the beautiful cluster lilies (Brodiaea elegans.)
And one of my favorites, fool’s onion.
I had come to photograph the oaks, still in fresh greenery, for my Columbia Gorge art project. What drew attention instead, or in addition, were the many dead trees. I saw mostly pines, felled by drought, which brought up thoughts to fire, no coincidence given the photographs from the East Coast, with horrendous smog drifting south from the Canadian fires this week.
These fires are raging in Quebec tree farms that are counted as carbon offset. These mono crop plantations are much prone to catastrophic burns. This year a combination of contributing factors created the catastrophe: warming temperatures led to earlier snow melt and little spring rain made the ground dry. Occasional freezing rain had weighed the trees down, with broken branches littering the forest floor, perfect tinder. Reforestation with mono crops has been the norm for remote areas previously damaged by mining, because it covers up the destruction and it generates income more quickly than waiting for a natural forest to re-emerge. “Reforestation” also enables claims that states are honoring their emissions reduction pledges in the IPCC framework.
Alas, that led to further contemplation – with an advance apology to my dear friends who have devoted part of their lives to replanting clear-cut swathes of land in order to help the environment – of a new report out of the Yale School of Environment that points to the problems with reforestation across the world.
“High-profile initiatives to plant millions of trees are being touted by governments around the world as major contributions to fighting climate change. But scientists say many of these projects are ill-conceived and poorly managed and often fail to grow any forests at all.“
The upshot of many studies says that afforestation is failing for a variety of reasons, but those failures go undocumented because there is no official follow-up to the PR actions that these plantings satisfy, and that they amount to little more than “greenwashing.”
“Cynical PR is one thing, but phantom forests are also increasingly sabotaging efforts to rein in climate change. This happens when planters claim the presumed take-up of carbon by growing forests as carbon credits. If certified by reputable bodies, these credits can count toward governments meeting their national emissions targets or be sold to industrial polluters to offset their emissions. Many corporations plan to use their purchase of carbon credits as a means of fulfilling promises to attain “net-zero” emissions. So the stakes are rising.”
If you have time to read the article, there is also a discussion on Oregon fires and general issues associated with the increased fire danger across the Western U.S. and problems with the credibility of our carbon offsets.
Heavy fare, I admit. But hey, at least this week brought some good news, with two Supreme Court decisions regarding voting rights and some guardrails for Medicaid included!
And there is always the option not to think at all and cherish the fact that the cherries are in season!
An blackberries not far behind.
Music from the Depression era reminds us of people’s resilience! Life is a bowl of cherries….
Hike with me. Pack the sunhat, yes, I mean it. If you are lucky we encounter another windless, cool but sunny day that brings the landscape into sharp relief and makes for long shadows.
The hike leads up to an old cherry orchard with a single remaining tree, on the Washington side of the Gorge, a longish hour’s drive straight East from PDX. I did the whole 5-mile loop some years ago, this time managed 2/3rds of that which counts as a grand achievement given the steep inclines.
The views of the Columbia river and the basalt cliffs are spectacular, once you up there after parking at river level.
The screes are impressive, walking on the unstable stones path is another matter. Not so much dangerous as simply requiring tons of concentration that you don’t loose your footing. Much time spent with eyes on the ground when they should be scanning the surround for its stark beauty.
Should you be so lucky, you’ll see a bald eagle flying in the distance just when you look up, eventually settling in one of the dry oak trees that dot the hillsides. If you quietly approach, you might find flickers as well, perfectly camouflaged against the lichen covered rocks. And always, always, ravens.
During the breaks to catch our breath, my fellow photographer and I talked about how differently serious photographers approach the views of the landscape.
What for us is still a marvel, a breathtaking exposure to beauty no matter how much affected by human habitation and intervention, is for others a grievous example of the loss of all that was pristine.
Some long for untouched nature, while I certainly am grateful for the roads and tunnels built into the mountains so I can reach meadows that are crisscrossed by paths carved by men, and orchards built into oak tree habitats.
Which is, of course, not to say that we should not be stewards of the earth. Plenty of reminders all around – the drought is visible, even this early in the year,
the river low.
Evidence from where we looked down the promontory confirms that we continue to ravage the planet – trains carrying oil or coal that traverse the Gorge endanger us all. Coal trains pollute the air, contaminate the ground and water with coal dust, and contribute to climate change. Oil trains endanger lives and environment with their potential for accidents. In 2016 a 96-car Union Pacific train carrying highly volatile Bakken crude oil derailed near this location, setting off a massive blaze. 47,000 gallons of escaped oil, 2,960 tons of oil-drenched soil, contaminated groundwater, and $9 million in cleanup costs, cause by Union Pacific’s failure to maintain the tracks. It was a miracle that the small town of Moisier was mostly spared. (Here is the link, once more, to our documentary film that tells the whole story.)
Of course it is stunning, as always, how tenaciously nature clings on, even under challenging conditions.
I was reminded of a poem by Lucille Clifton that urges us to rethink our relationship to nature and the responsibilities we have not just for our own species but for all others as well. A perfect entry into a week where I will follow up with another hike that shows the effects of climate change in a different fashion.
generations
people who are going to be in a few years bottoms of trees bear a responsibility to something besides people if it was only you and me sharing the consequences it would be different it would be just generations of men but this business of war these war kinds of things are erasing those natural obedient generations who ignored pride stood on no hind legs begged no water stole no bread did their own things
and the generations of rice of coal of grasshoppers
from How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton.(2020)s
Music today is an incredibly beautiful tune from Mongolia’s steppes – Wandering, played at about the tempo that I was walking up those cliffs. The whole album Cycle by Hugjiltu 胡格吉乐图 can be found here.
On a dry day last week I walked among the cornfields, aware of climate change with the water levels in the ponds still unseasonably low.
A bunch of corn stalks looked to me like a little band of marchers, moving forwards in determined protest. (Yes, my tendency to anthropomorphize has made it into 2023 intact…and you were worried!)
It got me thinking about what I’ve read in the scientific literature about how to communicate climate change for effective public engagement, in preparation for the documentaries I’ve been involved with. One memorable bit of instruction about collective action came from a TED talk by Maike Sippel, a Professor of Sustainable Economics at the University of Applied Sciences Konstanz, Germany.
Her name popped up again this week in an essay full of suggestions about what might help to change the world’s or our own approach to climate action. Her introduction refers to the proposal of the scientists of the IPCC that presence or absence of climate action in our decade will determine the living conditions on earth for the next 1000 year, a claim I agree with. Humanity is at a turning point. (And yes, I know I repeat myself. That, too, won’t change in 2023.)
Here (in German) are her 12 ideas to aide transformation, loosely summarized and translated by me below.
Think of yourself as part of the world, embedded within a community, but also within a timeline. Our actions need to be considered in the context of multiple generations to come.
Be grateful. A sense of gratitude to be alive and part of a larger whole can immunize you against the constant push to consume, to own, to search for novelty. Gratitude, perhaps captured in a diary or expressed in other forms of regular communication, can make us more content, and plays a role in how we treat others: it increases a sense of connectedness and generosity amongst ourselves.
Acknowledge pain and grief. Surveys reveal that 60 to 90% of respondents admit to climate anxiety – the burden of hearing about ongoing disasters, the fears about an uncertain future and the sacrifices that have to be made. If you talk about your own reactions with others you are strengthened by not being alone, being part of a community that shares both feelings and goals.
Base your actions on your values. This will be hard. Our behavior is entrenched, our joys often derivative from sources that are not climate friendly (think consumption of meat, or flying and driving, among others.) Listen to the unease that cognitive dissonance – I want x, but I’m doing y – brings about, and figure out what you can do.
Remember that change is possible. Social movement have historically been successful in ways nobody had anticipated. Things now are in flux, with many organizations, scientists, politicians and even international structures starting to call for and implement change.
The handprint matters. We all know about our climate “footprint,” the way our individual behavior contributes to noxious emissions. Personal decisions, however, take place within a framework of conditions, set by societies to influence choices, often in favor of industries that call the shots. Price regulation (flying is cheaper than taking the train), food availability (cafeterias are not offering vegetarian fare), social and legal covenants of acceptable behavior all constrain what the individual can do. Individual or collective efforts to change these structures are “handprints” – complementary efforts to the restriction of “footprints”. Individual contributions (fight for meat-less Mondays at your office, join groups to make the cities partly car free, engage in efforts to re-direct subsidies to industries that are not fossil fuel based, etc.) towards more climate friendly, structural conditions might have transformative results.
Use tools available for transformational processes. There are lots of leadership trainings available by people who have successfully helped groups with climate projects, for example Art of Hosting and Collective Leadership.
Seek out Good News.Fight the click-bait, over-representation of bad news to give your brain a break from permanent stress.
Talk about climate change. Not necessarily about the science or statistics, facts and morality, but about your experience with engagement and action, your own, personal way of dealing with the challenges.
Consider it an adventure. Transformation is not a walk in the park. You will encounter obstacles and resistance – just like in a real adventure. As heroes and heroines in this story we need courage, and, of course, allies. We will experience growth by overcoming obstacles, and we will persist without knowing if we will ever meet our goals. Every single human being bent towards transformation across history had to live through this, consider yourself in good company.
Take care of yourself. Everyone of us is needed for change. It’s imperative that we engage, invent solutions, and join the process with courage and positivity. All that is only possible if we are mindful of balance, and don’t overdo it to the point of burn-out. Too many balls in the air? Consider which one can be safely dropped. Stick to what’s most meaningful for you and is sustainable.
Music today by one of the most talented young cellists around, an arrangement of a Welsh song and excerpts from a classical Elgar concerto. Sheku Kanneh-Mason is a name you will remember and part of a generation that is spearheading change.
Walk with me. It’ll transport you into a world of wonder, visions of fairy tales where gnomes and goblins, witches and wolves cannot be far behind. Unless they’re sent into hiding by the onslaught of photographers…
The short and wonderfully wheelchair accessible hike through a 45 acres coastal marsh and old-growth cedar preserve can be found in Rockaway Beach near Garibaldi. Three years ago, a universal access, raised boardwalk opened, leading across a boggy swamp next to Saltair Creek, filled with humongous skunk cabbages, salal, pine snags and alders. Unfortunately there are very few places equipped with benches across the one mile loop, so that people who have difficulty walking without pauses might have a hard time.
Fungi, wild fuchsias, alder berries and late asters frame the walkway
Part of the loop, if you want to make a full circle rather than an in and out, is even more enchanted, since the absence of man-made structures allows you for a short moment to imagine yourself in a prehistoric temperate rain forest in all its sizable glory, roots and all.
Eventually you reach the largest of them all, an old red cedar, 154 feet in height and almost 50 feet in circumference that stands like a giant among the hemlocks and the Sitka spruce. It is said to be between 500 and 900 years old, in terms of mass one of our state’s biggest trees. It nurses younger hemlocks who send their roots down into the decaying remnants of the trunk.
Old growth forests have played a major role in the fairy tales of my childhood, places of danger and dread, but also of shelter and heroic quests from which the hero/ine emerged triumphant. Think of Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White or Rapunzel in their various woods. Forests have been places of lawlessness but also hiding spots for justice warriors (Hello, Robin Hood!) If you are interested, there is a lovely book on forests in the cultural imagination and what their climate-caused disappearance would imply (written and anticipated already in 1992), by Robert Pogue Harrison – Forests: The Shadow of Civilization.
“If forests appear in our religions as places of profanity, they also appear as sacred. If they have typically been considered places of lawlessness, they have also provided havens for those who took up the cause of justice and fought the law’s corruption. . . . In the religions, mythologies, and literatures of the West, the forest appears as a place where the logic of distinction goes astray.”
Just like the airy, feathery boughs of cedars contrast with the bulky forms of century old root systems, so do enchantment and disenchantment. For me as a kid, hiking in the Böhmewald during visits with my grandparents primarily meant magic: seeing birds, finding mushrooms, being surrounded by sounds and smells not quite familiar. But a sense of fear was never far behind. You could get lost, there might be predators (on 4 and 2 legs, we were warned,) and the remnants of the Brother Grimm indoctrination lurked on. Did witches exist, after all?
That fear has never quite left. Every time I watch a movie that starts with someone running or stumbling through a forest, I start to tense up, knowing that doom is impending. It doesn’t help that we now regularly get the view from above, these endless drone shots of trees and trees beyond horizon. Have you noticed how often films and shows use these tools with abandon in about any land- or cityscape, glad for their new toys? Of course I watch a lot of movies, junk and otherwise, evoking the forest, Hanna, The Revenant, Leave No Trace, The Blair Witch Project, and lately The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power among them, where I have developed some affection for a plucky harfoot heroine named Nori. But I digress.
The sense of mystery remains as well. Woods are so incredibly nuanced, in their layers, their simultaneous presence of life, decay and death in all imaginable stages, their function to provide food and materials for survival, crowned by their ability to clean the air for us – I stand in awe, every time these thoughts resurface during visits to the forests.
According to the U.N. we are losing 2.5 billion acres of forest – the size of Iceland – every single year. As Olivia Campbell put it:
“Climate change is our collective moral test, the physical manifestation of our sins of gluttony, sloth, greed, selfishness, consumerism, and unchecked industrialism. We have entered the threshold of a forest filled with lush, healthy greenery and teeming with diverse wildlife. The question is, will there be any woods left by the end of the story, or have we run out of places to hide?”
Music, how could I not, is about a fairy tale set in the woods….
I stand corrected and appreciate the countless emails gently scolding me for pegging LBJ as a Republican in one of this week’s blogs. My only excuse: I was 11 years old in Germany when he served as President… so now I know.
I also learned this week a few facts about fire season, given that the sight of endless burnt forests on the way to Central Oregon had made an emotional impact which I tried to counterbalance with reading about facts. Useless exercise, of course, since the newly apprehended facts triggered more of the same emotions…
For much of the American West fire season is now almost year-round. Warmer temperatures cause earlier snowmelt which allows vegetation to dry out. There is more atmospheric thirst, technically called evaporative demand, ever increasing due to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas levels. The concept basically quantifies the potential loss of water from the surface as driven by atmospheric factors including temperature, wind speed, humidity and cloud cover.
With more water vapor sucked up into the atmosphere, you have less water that drains into streams, wetlands and aquifers, particularly in the SouthWest. In turn, soil and vegetation become drier, increasing the risk of forest fires, and also hampering tree regeneration after they were hurt. Tree mortality soars.
In other words, it is not just the supply side – too little rain – that has changed. There is also the demand side – the warmer atmosphere collects and holds more water – that is affecting drought conditions. When water is increasingly drawn from the land surface through evaporation and transpiration, there is less available for plants, animals and humans.
The subsequently increased dryness of flammable materials – fuel aridity – has approximately doubled the Western forest fire area, and extended the times of year in which fires can be expected. As of July 15, 5,238,977 acres have burned in U.S. wildfires.
Less water in the soil, of course, means also that agricultural crops need more watering, putting demands on water sources that themselves have dried up. Crops in the Rio Grande Basin, for example, where some of New Mexico’s blazes burned this spring, need 8% to 15% more irrigation now than they did in 1980. (Ref.)
Humans have not only contributed to the frequency and intensity of wildfires by warming the atmosphere which in turn leads to drier fuel conditions. They have also created a “fire deficit” by (understandably) suppressing small wildfires as quickly as possible across decades. That allowed a lot of flammable material to build up in our forests that are now feeding these mega fires, the biggest ones starting in 2020.
Here is a link to a story about the consequences for communities hit by fires and how they are trying to build back.
And here are Robert Frost’s two cents, who cold not possibly have intuited the current state of the world.
“Ich will auch im Elend noch die Schönheit finden, denn die Schönheit ist es, die den Menschen Würde gibt. Es gibt immer Schönheit, immer.” – photographer Pierrot Men
(“I want to find beauty even in adversity, since it is beauty that confers dignity to human beings. There is always beauty, always.”)
Pierrot Men has been photographing in Madagascar for decades, and does indeed convey human strength in the depths of misery. I don’t necessarily agree with the first part of Men’s claim, however, since I believe dignity is completely independent of beauty, particularly since beauty is often defined within the context of a time or place. But I do believe it to be true that you can always find beauty.
I saw it when looking at the tree stumps exposed by drought-drained Detroit Lake, their skeletal forms so long submerged under water after the 1952 erection of the Detroit Dam along the North Santiam River in Oregon.
They were bleached to the shades of the surrounding earth, only the shadows from a glaring sun providing some 3-D information at times. But here and there some color popped, little signals of the life once held, not all completely calcified.
Beauty not linked to dignity. But beauty helping me to feel hopeful, which in turn helps to hold out.
“That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”
Holding out is also helped by poetry, particularly the sarcastically funny, metaphorically subtle poetry of one of Great Britain’s surrealist poets of the 1930s, Hugh Sykes Davies. Quite the character, as you can read for yourself if you click the link on his name. (It brings you to a long but exceedingly witty biographic sketch.)
A founding member of the London Surrealist Group, he was a man driven by boredom, risk-seeking, strong politics and opinions, always at the periphery of the many groups he temporarily attached to. Friend, then not, to Anthony Blunt, C.S. Lewis, C.P. Snow, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Salvador Dali and T.S. Eliot, among others. Married 5 times, with an equal number of bitter divorces.
Here is a poem from 1936, time of rising fascism and after a falling out with Eliot because of the latter’s religiosity and fascist leanings. Accompanied by my photograph of a stump not (yet) submerged.
Poem (‘In the stump of the old tree…’)
In the stump of the old tree, where the heart has rotted out, there is a hole the length of a man’s arm, and a dank pool at the bottom of it where the rain gathers, and the old leaves turn into lacy skeletons. But do not put your hand down to see, because
in the stumps of old trees, where the hearts have rotted out, there are holes the length of a man’s arm, and dank pools at the bottom where the rain gathers and old leaves turn to lace, and the beak of a dead bird gapes like a trap. But do not put your hand down to see, because
in the stumps of old trees with rotten hearts, where the rain gathers and the laced leaves and the dead bird like a trap, there are holes the length of a man’s arm, and in every crevice of the rotten wood grow weasel’s eyes like molluscs, their lids open and shut with the tide. But do not put your hand down to see, because
in the stumps of old trees where the rain gathers and the trapped leaves and the beak and the laced weasel’s eyes, there are holes the length of a man’s arm, and at the bottom a sodden bible written in the language of rooks. But do not put your hand down to see, because
in the stumps of old trees where the hearts have rotted out there are holes the length of a man’s arm where the weasels are trapped and the letters of the rook language are laced on the sodden leaves, and at the bottom there is a man’s arm. But do not put your hand down to see, because
in the stumps of old trees where the hearts have rotted out there are deep holes and dank pools where the rain gathers, and if you ever put your hand down to see, you can wipe it in the sharp grass till it bleeds, but you’ll never want to eat with it again.
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
Adrienne Rich, “What Kind of Times are These” from Collected Poems: 1950-2012.
So let’s talk about trees, or rather let’s look at them.
What was:
***
What is:
The fires are, of course, every where and getting worse. Not natural but man made disasters, if we consider them a consequence of climate change that we elicited. As I write this, the McKinney fire is growing rapidly in Northern California. It has grown to more than 51.000 acres in the last two days and cost lives, with thousands fleeing and losing their homes. Montana lands and people are afflicted by the Elmo fire, and Idaho residents are under evacuation orders since Saturday as the Moose Fire in the Salmon-Challis National Forest charred more than 67.5 square miles (174.8 square km) in timbered land near the town of Salmon.
Last month, the Pipeline Fire on Nuvatukaovi (Hopi) or Dookʼoʼoosłííd (Navajo) — the San Francisco Peaks — ripped through Arizona forests desiccated by the worst drought in 1,200 years. Thousands of people evacuated and major traffic ways closed for all. New Mexico has unprecedented fires as well, with two of the largest fires on record burning at the same time: The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon blaze and the Black Fire, approaching 350.000 acres.
Alaska is burning, some 55 fires across the region, active since June.
Here in Oregon, according to the official state website announcing current conditions and evacuation orders, we counted as of yesterday 19 fires.
And if you think there is some stark beauty captured in all of this devastation, I suggest you think about the toll to other living beings, and not just in terms of immediate death through burning or asphyxiation.
Short version of a long research report (with the table below laying out the framework): fires change population dynamics and environmental make-up in a way that affect immune responses and exposure to things that make animals, and eventually humans, sick. One major factor is an increasing contact with select parasites. Fire alters the exposure to parasites (habitat destruction, mortality, host movement, and community alteration)and also changes immune-mediated susceptibility (stress or injury and pollution). your immune system is simply not up to task if it has to fight on multiple fronts. If animals, including parasites, loose their habitat, they come in closer contact to human populations. Fires also shift the balance of a system of parasites, so that if some species are killed other species go unchecked, grow rampantly and are thus bringing more disease into mammalian populations.
So by all means, let’s talk about trees as well as the many, many other complex topics, from general climate to specific fire threats, so we can prepare adequate responses.
Here are the Sighing Firs, from Stanislaw Moniuszko’s HALKA.
