In the Weeds

The title of Lydia Millet’s last novel - Dinosaurs - seems to wink at the threat of human extinction, and, yet, its explicit referent in the book is to birds, those sometimes-alien creatures who survived the impact of the asteroid that wiped out most of their kind. This kind of double meaning, something like a sign that points in multiple directions, abounds in Dinosaurs, which is at once a moving human narrative and a reflection on the ways in which our frailty puts us at the mercy of our shortcomings as a species but also, ultimately, serves as an opening to discovering how much we care about the natural world. It was, as always, a great pleasure to talk to Lydia Millet about these and other matters. I hope you too will enjoy our conversation.

A continuation of my earlier episode in which Trevien Stanger - instructor of environmental studies at St. Michael's College in Vermont - and I discuss Abram's book, which, I think it's fair to say, has had a profound effect on both of us. This time, we focus on Abram's argument about the impact of the invention of the alphabet on our relationship with the natural world. 

If you'd like to listen to part 1 of this discussion - https://www.buzzsprout.com/356774/11992722

If you'd like to listen to my conversation with Johanna Drucker about the invention of the alphabet - 
https://www.buzzsprout.com/356774/11826284

There’s a funny little corridor tucked away behind a park in the Village of Pleasantville, New York where I live, where bears and bobcats amble through, walking atop the Catskill Aqueduct, the 100-year-old artery that delivers water from the Catskill mountains to New York City. Fellow resident, Michael Inglis, who has been hiking this patch of semi-wilderness for the past twenty-five years, has recently written a book about it, Woods and Water: Walking New York’s Nanny Hagen Brook. He calls this a “liminal space,” existing as it does at the margins of a human-dominated landscape. After reading his book, I asked him if we could take a walk along the Nanny Hagen brook together. As we explored off-trail, he pointed out the surprising number of native plants but also the corrosive effects of human influence, including the predominance of invasive plants that have escaped from suburban backyards into the wild. What ensued for me was a reflection on how human culture literally shapes the natural world, but also the ways in which nature can push back and be surprisingly resilient, when given the chance.

When we think of major innovations in human history, what comes to mind are inert technologies - from the wheel to the computer - but one of the most significant developments occurred as the result of the relationship between humans and another animal, horses. The domestication of horses brought about a major sea-change in human society, as we became much more mobile.  It affected everything from agriculture to warfare to the dissemination of language and culture. To discuss the domestication of horses and the impact of this relationship, I spoke with  William Taylor,  Assistant Professor and Curator of Archeology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  As Taylor explains, our understanding of this history continues to evolve thanks to new scientific tools, such as new types of genomic sequencing, but also due the work of anthropologists who observe present-day horse culture in Mongolia, contemporary Ukraine and other parts of the Eurasian steppes where the domestication of horses first took place. 

Jennifer Lynch Fitzgerald tells the story of her relationship with Maddie, a mustang rescued in Habersham County, Georgia from a man who was collecting horses to sell for meat.  When Maddie was found, she’d been tied to a tree for months, was malnourished and very angry.  Jen tells how, in spite of her limited experience with horses, she learned to train or "gentle" Maddie.  She discusses what she's learned about horse language and what it's meant to her to develop a relationship with an animal who was once wild.  This is the first installment of a short series of episodes on horses.  Horses have played such a significant role in human history that they are an important part of the nature/ culture nexus.  Before we delve into the history, however, I wanted to start with a story of a relationship between one human animal and one horse animal. 

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I’ve mentioned this book numerous times on the pod. It’s fair to say that David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass are the two books that really kicked off the idea for In the Weeds. And it feels like time to dig into Spell. All the more so since my current episodes are exploring the question “how did we get here?” Not only how did we materially arrive at our current environmental crisis but how did we, in the West, develop a culture that led to this mess, a culture that separates the human sphere from the natural world?

Environmentalists have been debating this question for some time and, as Abram himself acknowledges, there is not just one answer, though he does propose an intriguing one in Spell that I talked about in our last episode:  that the invention of the alphabet might have had something to do with it.

To discuss The Spell of the Sensuous, I reached out to Trevien Stanger, instructor of environmental studies and science at St. Michael’s College in Vermont and all around smart and thoughtful guy.

We examine the two influences that support Abram’s shift from a mechanistic to an animist view of the world: phenomenology, a philosophical movement started by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century, and the teachings of indigenous shamans that Abram encountered during his travels as an itinerant sleight-of-hand magician in Southeast Asia. Most of all, we try to understand what it would mean to experience the world the way that Abram would want us to, as a dynamic and relationally-rich encounter with the more-than-human.

There’s a lot to unpack and we take our time, so we only get about a third of the way into the book. We will continue our discussion in an upcoming episode.

And, yes, I have a cold :)

“Letters have power,” Johanna Drucker tells me.  But what is the nature of this power and how did it all begin? Unlike writing, the alphabet was only invented once. Somewhere in Egypt or the Sinai Peninsula, about 4,000 years ago, speakers of a Semitic language adapted Egyptian hieroglyphics to represent the basic phonetic building blocks of their language.  All modern alphabets can be traced back to this origin.

Johanna Drucker, Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, and author of numerous books, including her most recent, Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), talks to me about this fascinating history, from what archeology has uncovered to the alphabet’s central role in information technology. We also discuss a theory put forth by David Abram, in his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, that the alphabet opens “a new distance […] between human culture and the rest of nature,” as it turns our powers of perception inward and focuses our attention on human-made sounds and words.

Links to some of the things we discuss: Two key archeological sites where inscriptions of the first alphabet have been found:  Serabit el-Khadim and Wadi el-Hol. Sandstone sphinx at the British Museum with Proto-Sinaitic letters. The Acrophonic principle. The Ahiram sarcophogus and shards found in Israel. Unicode. See also in-the-weeds.net.

William Bryant Logan’s book Sproutlands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees opens the door to a little known history, in which people all over the world, from Norway to Japan to pre-colonial California, managed trees in a way that was beneficial to trees and humans alike.   Logan stumbled upon this history after taking on a job for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for which he was given the task of pollarding trees. Pollarding is an ancient technique for pruning trees that, along with coppicing, was used for millennia to cull woodlands without having to destroy the forest. These techniques were an integral part of managed woodlands, in which people kept livestock, harvested different kind of food and cut wood that was used for everything from energy to building ships and houses to creating floating walkways. This managed cultivation was not only productive for humans; it also allowed trees to live longer and created more biodiversity than existed in unmanaged woods. All of this, as Logan explains to us, was possible because of the remarkable regenerative property of trees, which allows many species of trees to resprout in the most unlikely situations and in the most unlikely ways. In theory, at least, Logan tell us, trees can live indefinitely and, in some unusual cases, they seem to do just that.

William Bryant Logan is the author of Sproutlands, Oak, Air and Dirt, the last of which was made into an award-winning documentary. He is a long-time faculty member of the New York Botanical Garden where he teaches pruning. He is a certified arborist and the founder and president of Urban Arborists, Inc., a Brooklyn-based tree company. He has also been a regular garden writer for the New York Times and was a contributing editor to House Beautiful, House and Garden and Garden Design magazines. 

Picking up where we left off in the spring, we return to the topic of farming through a conversation with John Roulac, entrepreneur and executive producer of the movie Kiss the Ground. 

Roulac’s latest project, Agroforestry Regeneration Communities, supports initiatives in Central America and East Africa that teach farmers how to grow what are sometimes called food forests. 

Food forests  mimic the structure and diversity of natural forests; they have the ability to restore ecosystems and bring diversified nutrition and economic development to rural communities.

This approach to farming – new by contrast with post-World War II industrial-style farming but based on techniques that are thousands of years old – is a relatively inexpensive way to make farming sustainable and, in fact, beneficial with respect to carbon capture, climate resilience and biodiversity, among other impacts. Ironically, Roulac notes, there is little investment in this low-hanging fruit among the solutions to our environmental problems.

For the second of three episodes on farming, I talk to Nate Looney about Jewish ethics, Diversity Equity and Inclusion and, yes, farming, specifically, his experience as an urban farmer using hydroponics and aquaponics to produce gourmet leafy greens and microgreens for restaurants and farmers markets in his hometown of L.A.

Nate Looney has followed an unusual career path, from the U.S. National Guard to service in New Orleans and Iraq as a military police soldier to CEO and Owner of Westside Urban Gardens, an urban agricultural start-up based in L.A., to his current job as JEDI (“Jewish Equity Diversity and Inclusion”) Director of Community Safety and Belonging for the Jewish Federations of North America. As such, his thinking often moves across disciplines, linking practical matters to questions of ethics, combining his experience of farming with his knowledge of Jewish thought.  

“When you control seed, you control life on earth,” says Indian environmental activist and scholar Vandana Shiva in the new documentary film The Seeds of Vandana Shiva.  Known as “Monsanto’s worst nightmare,” Vandana Shiva has been a champion of small, organic farms, since she established seed banks, in a subversive act she likens to Gandhi’s championing of the spinning wheel, to counter the efforts of large corporations to control agriculture in India through the selling of pesticides and trademarked GMO seeds. In this episode - the first of three on farming - I talk to filmmaker Jim Becket about making the film and about the story of Vandana Shiva’s life and mission.

Mermaids are the fly in the ointment in Lydia Millet’s very funny satirical novel Mermaids in Paradise, “an absurdist entry into the mundane,” as she puts it. And, yet, her mermaids, who have bad teeth and the particular features of individuals, also draw us into the wonders of the ocean itself.  Mermaid lore, Millet reminds us, recalls manatees and the order of the Sirenia, and it speaks to “the way we imprint our imaginations onto the wild.”  

One of the most interesting writers working at the intersection of fiction and environmentalism, Lydia Millet has written over a dozen novels and story collections, many about ties between humans and animals and the crisis of extinction. Her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019 and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. 

In this episode, we discuss her 2015 novel Mermaids in Paradise and the ways in which she uses these hybrid, mythical creatures to address our environmental crises.  We also talk at length about story telling, the kinds of stories we tell and how they both help and hinder our relationship with the natural world. 

As co-editors of The Penguin Book of Mermaids, a compendium of stories from all over the world, Marie Alohalani Brown and Cristina Bacchilega show us that mermaids are not always white, not always beautiful and don’t even always have a fish tail (sometimes mer creatures have the tail of a whale or an anaconda). 

What they also teach us is that legends of merfolk and other kinds of water spirits exist pretty much everywhere that people do.

What is so fundamental about these myths of hybrid creatures that bridge the human world and the water world? Why are they so often female and alluring? How to the myths change across cultures? And what do they have to tell us today about our relationship to the natural world and to oceans and water in particular? 

Thanks to my guests, this episode will leave you with a new understanding of what a mermaid is or, rather, can be.

Cristina Bacchilega coedits Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies and is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa where she taught fairy tales and their adaptations, folklore and literature, and cultural studies. An Anglo-Indian Italian who is non-white settler in Hawaiʻi, Cristina approaches wonder tales and other traditional narratives from a transcultural perspective that privileges the juxtaposition of different cultural narratives to highlight their distinctive worldviews and ways of knowing. Her most recent book with Jennifer Orme (2021), Inviting Interruptions: Wonder Tales in the 21st Century, features Maya Kern’s comic How To Be a Mermaid.

Marie Alohalani Brown is an Associate Professor of Religion, specialist in Hawaiian religion, culture, and oral/literary traditions at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is a trained translator and works primarily with Hawaiian-language resources. She is the author of Ka Poʻe Moʻo Akua: Hawaiian Reptilian Water Deities (University of Hawaiʻi Press, January 31, 2022). Her first book, Facing the Spears of Change: The Life and Legacy of John Papa ʻĪʻī (University of Hawaʻi Press, May 2016), won the biennial Ka Palapala Poʻokela award for the categories of Hawaiian language, culture, and history (2016 and 2017). She is the co-editor with Cristina Bacchilega of A Penguin Book of Mermaids (Penguin Classics, 2019). 

According to Mark Zuckerberg and others, the metaverse - a would-be digital double of the real world - is good for the environment, because it will make us drive less, fly less. We won’t have to visit the barrier reef in person; we can experience it from our own living rooms. But will this descent into technology make us more alienated than we already are from the natural world? And do we really want to recreate an idea out of dystopian science fiction anyway? These are some the the issues I discuss with Lisa Messeri, Assistant Professor at Yale University in the Anthropology Department who studies science and technology and whose upcoming book, In the Land of the Unreal, explores arguments that VR - virtual reality - can be a force for good.

https://www.in-the-weeds.net

Chris Schaberg, whom you might remember from my episode on SUV commercials, has written a number of books on air travel. I wanted to talk to him about the impact of air travel on climate change but also about what air travel - and, increasingly, the fantasy that we can be tourists in space as well - reveals about the relationship between us human animals and the sophisticated technology that drives globalization (and, as a fall out, climate change). I was also itching to talk about Adam McKay’s film Don’t Look Up, in which a comet hurtling towards the earth serves as an analogy for climate change, and Chris was kind enough to indulge me.

in-the-weeds.net
to contact the host - asquith.intheweeds@gmail.com

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Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris have been working at the intersection of art and climate activism for the last fifteen years. They are co-founders of the Canary Project, started in 2006 and inspired by a series of articles that Elizabeth Kolbert published in The New Yorker that eventually became her book Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

Adapting Kolbert’s investigative strategy, Ed and Susannah initially set out to photograph places around the world being impacted by climate change - in order to call out a warning, as the name Canary Project suggests.  (Though the photographs themselves or the installations that ensued were subsequently renamed History of the Future.) 

Since then, Susannah and Ed have worked on numerous projects, from Green Patriot Posters to the more recent Toolshed, and helped coordinate works of fellow artists tackling climate change. They also both teach in the Dept. of Film and Media Arts at Syracuse University.

As a former student of the arts (more the literary kind than the visual kind, but who’s quibbling), I was curious about the ability of art to engage in climate activism. What can the artist achieve that the scientist and the journalist cannot, I wondered? And, conversely, what are art’s limitations?

To see the photos and other images we discuss, go to in-the-weeds.net

To check out Susannah and Ed’s latests project go to https://tool-shed.org

In time for the winter solstice, we revisit our episode on the history of Christmas trees with historian Judith Flanders, author of Christmas: A Biography (2017) as well as numerous books on the Victorian period, including The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Reveled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime and The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London.

Flanders helps us to parse history from myth, as we discuss the origins of Christmas and the practice of bringing evergreen trees into our homes to decorate them for the holidays. 

Guitar rendition of “O Tannenbaum” by Dave Larzelere.

In our continuing series on climate change, I talk to Meg Lowman who knows more about trees than most people on this planet. She invented canopy ecology - the practice of studying trees in the treetops - and has worked across 46 countries and 7 continents, designing hot air balloons and walkways and other ways to explore and study this diverse biosphere. 

We discuss her recent book, The Arbonaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us. This riveting memoir takes us from her small-town roots in New England to her work in Australia, where she first climbed trees to study leaves and also, along the way, married an Australian sheep rancher and had her two sons, to her exploration of forests in California, India, Malaysia, Ethiopia and beyond.

Lowman’s prognosis for the future of our forests is grim but her message is clear: “It's not good enough to plant trees. We have to save the big trees!” One way we can do that is by supporting treefoundation.org, which is working to build ten canopy walkways in the ten most endangered forests of the world - an innovation which not only allows visitors to experience the dynamic life and biodiversity of the canopy but also brings economic and social benefits to the people living near these forests, thus helping the local communities and helping to save their forests.

For more see https://in-the-weeds.net 

To find out what we know about how a warming planet will affect the forests in my home state of New York, I visit Black Rock Forest, a research station in the Hudson Highlands, and talk to Andy Reinmann, Assistant Professor in the Environmental Sciences Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center of the Graduate Center, CUNY and in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at Hunter College.

We talk Phenocams, melting snow packs in New England, which tree species are likely to survive a warmer climate and how trees can help mitigate the impact of erratic weather in cities and suburbs. And glory in the beauty of a New York autumn!

in-the-weeds.net

to check out the Phenocam network via The University of New Hampshire: https://phenocam.sr.unh.edu/webcam/

Black Rock Forest website: https://www.blackrockforest.org

In the second installment of our series on climate change, I talk to environmental journalist and science curator for TED Talks David Biello about his book, The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age. Biello argues that, culturally, we’re still prey to the false notion that there’s a divide between the human and the natural, when, in fact, we humans are dependent on the natural world for our survival and are, furthermore, affecting every corner of the world, no matter how remote. We explore this notion of the Anthropocene - the geologic term meant to define an era in which humans are having such a dramatic effect on the earth that we will leave our mark in the geologic record. Biello argues we need to take ownership of our oversized role and become better, more deliberate and thoughtful stewards of our home. Along the way, he also has lots of interesting stories to tell, from the effort to bring back the wooly mammoth to the use of garbage to generate energy in Rizhao, China.