The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing From Crisis to Sustainability
" The new environmental politics must be broadened now so that environmental concern and advocacy extend to the full range of relevant issues. Efforts within the framework of today’s environmentalism must continue; indeed, they must be strengthened. But the environmental agenda should expand to embrace a profound challenge to consumerism and commercialism and the lifestyles they offer, a healthy skepticism of growth-mania and a redefinition of what society should be striving to grow, a challenge to corporate dominance and a redefinition of the corporation and its goals. "The new agenda should also incorporate advocacy of human rights as a central concern. Though environmental justice has gained a foothold in American environmentalism, it is not yet the priority it should be. Across much of the world social justice concerns and environmental concerns are fused as one cause, and many environmental leaders have been persecuted, jailed, and murdered. They are brothers and sisters, and their rights to life, speech, and democracy should be vigorously defended. Many established environmental issues must be seen as human rights issues."
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Thousand Mile Song
Pop quiz! (Pun intended.) Name an album from 1970 that is still in print with more than 30 million copies sold. The Beatles’ Let It Be ? The soundtrack of Woodstock ? Nope. It’s Songs of the Humpback Whale , an eerie collection of booms, moans, sighs, chirps, buzzes, gulps, and violin-like sounds made by actual whales. Without this hit, the jazz musician and philosopher David Rothenberg argues in Thousand Mile Song , "there might never have arisen a movement to save the whales, transforming their image from oil and blubber to gentle serenaders of the sea." The navy first recorded whale songs in the 1950s while listening for Russian submarines. It wasn’t until 1967 that these secret tapes were given to the biologist Roger Payne, who helped produce Songs of the Humpback Whale to draw attention to the excesses of commercial whaling. In 1972, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act, banning the importation of all marine mammals and their products into the United States. Today, only Japan, Norway, and Russia continue to hunt whales. Whale populations are now recovering in what Rothenberg calls a conservation success story based on the intersection of science and art. We make music. Whales make music. How could we kill animals that "sing so beautifully"? Music can be defined as an art form that uses sounds and silence. But can a whale be called a musician? Rothenberg would say yes. The long, repeated phrases in a humpback whale’s song often end with a similar sound, and so they can be said to rhyme. Within a song, different patterns also end with the same sound, creating a recognizable rhythm. Only males sing in this way, usually at winter breeding grounds, and all males sing the same song — one that evolves as the breeding season progresses. The song is different the next year, suggesting that whales, like humans, seek novelty and innovation. They may also be seeking mates, though no one can say how this works since no one has ever seen a female actually approach a singing male. Some scientists argue that the singing is a form of male bonding or cooperation — although, again, they can’t explain why or how. As Rothenberg the philosopher lays out these controversies, he eagerly reveals the gaps in our knowledge. The natural conclusion, as he sees it, is that we don’t know enough about whales. Rothenberg the jazz artist has his own agenda, and it is not particularly scientific. He wants to jam with whales. He wants to play a duet, their songs and his clarinet: an interspecies performance that might allow him to enter "the whale aesthetic." Whenever he can — as a guest on a scientific expedition or a paying passenger on a whale-watching tourist boat, at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago playing to beluga whales (a small whale known to make a variety of sounds) or on a Russian island in the White Sea — Rothenberg pursues his dream using a combination of underwater speakers and hydrophones that allow him to hear whales singing even as they are able to hear him. One beluga at the aquarium finally copies one of Rothenberg’s notes, a G just above middle C. The belugas in the White Sea also mimic that note and respond with their own screams, wails, cries, and clicks. Is this interspecies music? Rothenberg is inclined to think so: "A whale sings, a clarinet rings. The sounds overlap and connect." His best jam is with a humpback whale in Hawaii. On a tour boat decorated with astrological signs, Rothenberg encounters a whale that plays off his own riffs, not interrupting but adding to the sound of his clarinet with low growls and super-high squeaks, echoing the pitch and timbre of the instrument. The musical pursuit of whales might needlessly disturb the animals, and Rothenberg does have the grace to doubt himself: perhaps this is all a "ridiculous stunt." His story is nevertheless worth reading for the questions it raises: Is the artistic impulse solely human? How much can people truly interact with whales? And is making music with a giant underwater creature a new kind of silliness, or perhaps a new way of understanding this mysterious and remarkable animal?
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Central Park in the Dark
When last we heard from Marie Winn, she had evolved from a reporter for the Wall Street Journal into a bird-watcher who stalked the canyons of New York following a hawk named Pale Male, an adventure which she chronicled in her popular book, Red-Tails in Love . This, it turns out, was just the beginning of Winn’s transformation into a stalker of the urban wild, and in her new book she describes the many nights that she and a small band of fellow nature lovers spent roaming Central Park in search of bugs and beasts. Central Park in the Dark is the fascinating story of the author’s discovery of a new country — one that few New Yorkers visit, at least in the way she does — a country called night. Initially, and understandably, afraid of going into the park after sunset, Winn grows braver and braver until she and her friends become the park’s unofficial night watchmen, playing a role like Thoreau’s self-appointed one as "inspector of snowstorms." In this role they check nightly on sleeping robins, hunting screech owls, feeding moths, and, of course, a nesting hawk or two. What draws them into the park is a series of mysteries, like what the long-eared owl they’ve been watching has been eating. By picking tiny rodent skulls and teeth out of the pellets the owl has coughed up, Winn discovers that the answer to this question is white-footed mice, a discovery that causes quite a stir at the American Museum of Natural History, where no one was aware that such a rodent inhabited the park across the street. Of this bit of detective work Winn writes poetically: "You’ve penetrated the darkness with the help of an owl’s digestive system." Amateurs have long added to our store of knowledge about ornithology, and Winn and her friends are no exception. They don’t just watch the night creatures, they figure things out: for instance, that the park’s screech owls are diminishing in number precisely because evolution has taught them to fly low after rodents, a habit that can be fatal in a park traversed by cars. At another point Winn wonders: just where do all the robins go at night? The search for an answer leads not just around the park but to the Internet, where Winn uncovers an article by a nineteenth-century naturalist who discovered a single tree in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that held 1,200 birds. Eventually Winn and her friends find their own robin tree and, in the pre-dawn darkness, watch it explode with birds as "a huge black wave of robinhood surged out into the morning’s gloom." And so a simple question leads to another mystery solved and another wild sight that few have ever seen. Part of the pleasure of the book is that its sense of discovery is contagious. While reading it I found myself getting out before dawn to check in on my local birds. My one quibble is with the author’s occasional descent into cuteness. There is a point, about two-thirds into the book, when a serious birder takes Winn to task for using cute names for the birds — specifically, calling two screech owls Spiffy and Unmade Bed. Winn replies that she didn’t name, but merely described, the birds, and then suggests that the offended gentleman "lighten up." I can imagine, however, that more than a few serious nature lovers, birders, and scientists will respond to Winn’s book the way that birder did to the naming. Too cute, too lovey-dovey, too anthropomorphic. While the grumblers have a point, I would say to them just what Winn said to the birder. Lighten up. Lighten up and enjoy, because the only reason these tendencies are bothersome at all is because of what they get in the way of: a terrifically engrossing story. And without her quirks, many readers wouldn’t follow Winn on her increasingly bold adventures into the night. Proper, if eccentric, full of her jokes and her friends, the author sets out to solve her small mysteries. But at its best the book itself has a larger question in mind: how to be in this confused, modern world. Marie Winn, cute bird names and all, answers that with her passion as she throws herself out into the darkness, demonstrating for the rest of us the pleasure of connecting one’s life to the greater mysteries.
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Central Park in the Dark
From Our Contributors: Summer 2008
"Fryeburg is old, established in 1762, and a little inbred: the same dozen names show up on buildings, parks, cemeteries, hills, and rosters of elected or appointed officials. I meet men who own mountains, miles of lakefront, and vast swathes of forest handed down by land grants from the governor of Massachusetts. I hear about strangers showing up in town to buy property and the water that flows under it. Before long, Fryeburg seems like Chinatown , the movie, to me. Everywhere I turn there is intrigue, there is someone with a heated opinion, with "water on the brain," as Jake Gittes, the character played by Jack Nicholson, puts it. I hear about hydrogeologists drilling test wells on the q.t., about dummy corporations, secret planning-board meetings, tape recorders at public meetings that stop at convenient times, notes that go missing, and appointed officials suspected of shilling for outside corporate interests. I meet the man who provided access to the spring that fills the tanker trucks of Nestlé." Elizabeth Royte’s Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It was published in June by Bloomsbury.
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From Our Contributors: Summer 2008