Fly in Your Burger?

"In a typical fast food meal of a hamburger, fries, and a milkshake, most of the components required an insect somewhere along the way; although the wheat in the bun is wind-pollinated, the other plants, from the cucumber for the pickle to the feed eaten by the cow, are insect-pollinated. Nicola Gallai from the University of Montpellier in France and her colleagues estimated the world economic value of pollination to be $153 billion, pointing out that this is nearly 10 percent of the value of agricultural production used for human food in 2005."

- Marlene Zuk,  Sex on Six Legs: On Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World

Just one more reason to think twice about that squeeze bottle of Bug-Blaster.

For me, science writers fall into two broad categories: those with scientific backgrounds and PhDs who have entered the realm of journalism, and those with hard-boiled reorting backgrounds who are exploring the realms of science. In practice, you hopefully won't be able to tell, from the text alone, what kind of writer wrote which successful popular science article or book. Dr. Zuk, an entomologist at the University of California-Riverside, falls into the first category. In preparation for my master's program, I'm trying to read a wide swath of authors and steal as many of their tricks as I can. Zuk spins off a new riff on the ever dependable method of putting economic value to overlooked wildlife: she shows us how many dollars worth of insects it took to produce your double cheeseburger with pickles and diced onions.

M is for Memoir

            I have said some rude things about memoirs. In a creative nonfiction workshop at Truman State, I said that while I had respect for memoirists and had no doubt of their works’ literary quality, I simply had no appetite for the genre myself. I couldn’t understand, I questioned my professor and classmates (many of them ardent memoir fans and autobiographers themselves) one why it was that people described the value of a good memoir in terms of the volume of Kleenex used (usually something around a box-worth.) At that time, I had little tolerance for other students’ belief that confession was the supreme form of communication, instead putting my faith in a kind of literary stoicism. There was place for feeling in writing, but it was better put to use in understanding other people’s experiences or in researching a challenging but beloved subject.

            And I was led to my first book-length memoir, Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, on somewhat false pretenses, or at least ignorance. A science writing professor recommended the title to me, and even once I understood it was not merely a dispassionate book about falconry but the story of how a woman copes with her father’s loss, I thought that I would at least meet this story through the comfortable distance of fiction, not of memoir.

            However, once I realized in the first chapter what I was reading, I had been entranced by MacDonald’s narrative voice so completely that genre seemed beside the point. She begins with a trip to the Brecklands (meaning ‘the broken lands’) as an escape from her scholarly work in Cambridge. She comes upon a pond:

 “The pond was a bomb crater, one of a line dropped by a German bomber over Lakenheath in the war. It was a watery anomaly, a pond in dunes, surrounded by thick tussocks of sand sedge many, many miles from the sea. It was odd. But then, it’s very odd here, and walking the forest you come across all sorts of things you don’t expect. Great tracts of reindeer moss, for example: tiny stars and florets and inklings of an ancient flora growing on exhausted land. Crisp underfoot in summer, the stuff is like a patch of the arctic fallen into the world in the wrong place.”

            MacDonald is adept at seeing how human actions and feral forces interact to create wild landscapes. Her hawk is at once domesticated and wild, the most difficult of raptors to train. She also excels in picking apart our romantic and ultimately false-hearted attempts to preserve or recreate ‘pure nature,’ showing how our beliefs about what is authentic and what is not are changeable and often misguided, unhelpful to human or creature. Instead, she favors whatever actions allow natural beauty to persist, whether it be found on the moors or in suburban Britain.

            In addition to exploring her natural landscape, the landscape of grief for her father, and the landscape within the mind of her goshawk, Mabel, MacDonald also takes a compassionate but unsparing look at the English writer T.H. White, perhaps the only other author to write a memoir centered around goshawk training, The Goshawk. White’s struggles with his own demons guide MacDonald away from self-loathing, and tutor her in how to be a more humane hawk-keeper.

            The language of falconry is enticingly archaic, with inputs from medieval English, French, and Turkish.  A goshawk-keeper is an austringer. A hawk struggling against its jesses, hungry for rabbits, is said to be in yarak. While she walks about the south of Britain, wild-eyed goshawk on leather-gloved arm, as if a figure out of its medieval or at least its Georgian past, MacDonald casts a shrewd eye on lazy neo-nationalism that would label her more essentially English than a recently arrived family from Algeria making their way in London or Manchester. After talking companionably with an older couple about some nearby deer, one of the few successful conversations with strangers she has managed in months, MacDonald is horrified to hear the man say, “Isn’t it a relief that there’re things still like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in?”

As a University of Cambridge historian with a Scottish name—a culture which at different times has carried the respect of landed gentry and the indignity of backwoods rebels in the eyes of their English neighbors—MacDonald recognizes the fluidity of identity and the dangers of labelling a skin tone, animal-training hobby or an ancestry as more pure than the rest. Indeed, goshawks were extirpated from England in the 19th century and now exist there only as immigrants from the mainland, where they hunt hares that were similarly introduced. So were the deer.

*           *            *

            My problem with memoirs, I realized as I read H is for Hawk, had to do not with the genre but with my expectations for what a book should do for me. Should it only educate, titillate, and make me chuckle? Or was I willing, as I once was when much younger before I knew I had the choice in the matter, to invite a book into the more private circle of close confidants who share their most difficult experiences, as well as their greatest joys? And not through the angled mirror of fiction, the transparent guise of “I have this friend who did this and that,” but in a simple and direct storytelling tone of catching up with a friend after a long absence, eliminating as many illusions and artifices as possible?

            Even when I did not like memoirs, the notion that autobiography is self-serving cut no ice with me. How much more would we all strive for moral clarity and good service to others, if we knew that we would at some point call ourselves to account in a novel-sized analysis of our greatest choices? How much have we gained, in a mere documentary sense, from the countless diarists of past ages? And in this case, how much damned good nature writing would we lose if we refused to listen to the personal narrative within which it exists, which created it?

            I am grateful for MacDonald for introducing me to the surprising and beautiful world of goshawk training and the craggy English landscape. But most of all, I am grateful that I can believe, at least in some sense, that I have gained a friend through her work—that I have communicated forthrightly with another person and have expanded my circle of confidence with her book.

Reconciliation

Today seems like a good day to say something that’s been on my mind for years—

To all the LGBTQ people that went to Catholic schools with me: I’m sorry for not taking the time to realize how screwed up the church’s policies about queer people are. Sorry for anything I said or did, whether intentionally or unintentionally, that made you feel less than equal, less than infinitely meaningful. Or at the least, towards the end, for not doing anything substantial for you in a culture that was frequently hostile to your identity. And thank you to the friends, teachers and writers who woke me up.

 "It is so ordered."

We all will benefit from today’s victory in ways impossible to count or predict, but this belongs to you, and you are so deserving.

The Novelist's Eye View of Conservation and Climate Change: An Exchange

A Downy Woodpecker [photo by Marisa Gearin]

After we read Jonathan Franzen’s essay “Climate Capture” for biology senior seminar, I demanded that Jim Santel, my good friend and committed Franzenian, read it, too. He suggested we have a little scholarly discussion about the piece, and what it means care about wildlife in our fragmented age. Currently senior writer at the Robert F. Kennedy Center, Jim is an absurdly successful essayist and fiction writer whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, The Believer and the LA Review of Books. He blogs at Traction. He foolishly allowed me the last word here.

Jim,

Science is about skepticism, and that’s what makes it so valuable, beautiful, and hard. It fits well into an essay when things appear as tidy opposites—when just a small cost increase would buy special glass to reduce bird window-strike mortality, but the bad men don’t buy it to save costs. But I work with an ornithologist studying window-strikes. He’s skeptical about the techniques currently marketed to reduce such bird deaths, and hopes to experiment with them to find out if any truly work. It might turn out that the one act we think would restore balance to Middle Earth might not save a single hobbit.

In “Carbon Capture,” a recent piece in the New Yorker, novelist Jonathan Franzen offers a corrective to our “Puritan” focus on climate change to the detriment of more immediately impactful conservation efforts. His opening gambit is convincing: when the Vikings built their new glass-walled football stadium, the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Jim Williams argued that it was worthless to worry about the thousands of birds projected to die from striking the glass walls when “the real threat to birds was climate change.” Williams seemed to be drawing from a contemporary report from the National Audubon Society stating that climate change was the “greatest threat” to American birds, even though the apocalyptic date for this threat was 2080. Arguments like this allowed the sponsors to decline increasing the cost of the project by one tenth of one percent to install specially patterned glass that could have helped prevent bird deaths.

As a polemic, Franzen’s essay is successful in getting his readers out of the rut of worrying about climate change and forgetting about the issues close at hand. It’s not that we shouldn’t worry about climate change—it’s that not driving to get groceries doesn’t get you five minutes less time in climate change purgatory. You should focus on “helping something you love, something right in front of you, [where] you can see the results”—for the sake of our own inner peace, and for the birds.

But first, a word of reproach. In criticizing the Audubon’s climate change PR tactics, Franzen puts scare quotes around “citizen science data,” as well as “report,” and scare quotes seem to be implied around ‘scientists’ in the phrase “its own scientists.” While it is true that a report from a nonprofit is different from peer-reviewed literature, Franzen would do well to remember that those individuals are actual scientists, and that online citizen birdwatcher data—often collected by people with more experience than he—has made possible continental and global population monitoring.

Being someone “who cares about birds more than the next man” does not qualify one to make sweeping generalizations about bird biology and responses to climate change. Ornithologists with PhD’s are not exempt from this—the only difference is that there’s more pressure on an ornithologist to cite her sources and provide convincing evidence than there is for a science journalist. Franzen’s claim, early in the essay, that “North America’s avifauna may well become more diverse,” is the sort of marginally acceptable evidence used in a polemic. The range expansions from climate change we have seen are not good ones, not ones that increase biodiversity: mosquitoes moving up mountains and armadillos tearing up the southern United States. Franzen conveniently overlooks the utter havoc that would likely result if tropical species expanded their ranges into temperate North American ecosystems, and the possibility of next-to-irreversible loss or alteration of northern habitats that are dependent on particular climactic conditions.

A dose of humility, in other words, would be refreshing.

If it matters, I agree with Franzen that some models based on range-shifts have overestimated the impacts of climate change on bird populations. But I would only go so far as the cautious correctives written by those with the data: Dawson and colleagues in 2011, or Millar and Herdman in 2004, for example. Vertebrate responses to climate change was the topic of a literature review I wrote for a class last spring. I cited 17 sources in that paper, and still sometimes think of how my teacher, a seasoned ornithologist and evolutionary biologist, recommended I should have included more studies, more systems. I do wonder how many peer-reviewed articles Franzen read for his essay, and how many he thought was enough.

But after his arrogance plays out, Franzen stays and listens to longtime conservationist Daniel Janzen later in the piece. This tropical ecologist acts as a sort of doppelgänger for Franzen—instead of devoting his life to fiction like Franzen, Janzen and his wife Winnie Hallwachs have spent “nearly half [their] lives” creating the Area Conservation de Guanacaste (ACG) in Costa Rica, a massive reserve that includes much of the tropical dry forest remaining in the world. (Aside: Franzen makes the comment that “the forest in Santa Rosa seemed desperately dry to me,” aware that he is visiting a dry forest in the dry season. He next concludes all cows in Scotland are brown.) Listening to Janzen’s stories about the many struggles of ACG—“the story of Oliver North’s airstrip for the contras … the story of Janzen’s discovery that dry-forest moth species spend part of their life cycle in humid forest, and how this led him and Hallwachs to expand the scope of their already ambitious project … the story of how Janzen and Hallwachs learned to do business with multiple landowners simultaneously”—leads Franzen to his most admirable idea: that conservation work “is novelistic.” It is about narrative, and “no narrative is simple.”

My time in the company of ecologists could be reduced to this elegantly simple idea. The traditional scientific manuscript format is also known as a “narrative report”—it tells a complex story. Here’s what we thought at first, here’s where we are now, and here’s all the weird shit that happened in between. And the usually unspoken reality is that ecologists fall in love with their subject, and that this and only this can sustain a worthwhile career. It is this close association between fiction writing and conservation that allows me to continue on a trajectory towards becoming a full-time biologist rather than a full-time writer, and I thank Franzen for his flawed but beautiful reminder of what it is I think I’m doing with my life.

But if I see him, the first thing I’ll say is that you don’t “census” birds, you survey them. (You can never detect every individual.) It matters.

*          *          *

Conor,

You have the virtue of being both scientist and writer; I can lay claim only to the latter title. Still, as someone who has spent more time thinking about Franzen than the next man (har har), I was intrigued by his argument that our fixation on the “eschatology” of climate change has come at the expense of more traditional conservation efforts—that, in environmental terms, we’ve allowed anxiety about the future to license indifference to the present.

The essay bears many Franzonian hallmarks: a certain arrogance, which you have deftly identified; a seductive either/or argument that suffers under scrutiny; a rueful faith in mankind’s ability to somehow stumble through the end times; and a tendency toward contrarianism.

Along with his significant novelistic success, these are the things that drive people nuts about Franzen. As an unabashed fan, I admit to wishing he would avoid the clumsy scare-quoting that you identify. From what I can tell, Franzen is a pretty knowledgeable birdwatcher, and he was also a devoted high school science student. You’re right: he ought to know better than to denigrate researchers whom he should probably consider allies. (A separate bad science question: Franzen quotes Don Alberto, a leader of an indigenous Colombian community, as saying that the sun feels hotter to him in recent years. Without question, Franzen accepts Don Alberto’s testimony as a sign of a warming planet. That’s not really how climate change works, is it?)

I think the weakest part of the essay is the either/or argument; a professor responding to Franzen’s essay in the April 20^th New Yorker called Franzen’s opposition between conservation and climate change a “false choice.” Your post gets at the same point, and it confirmed some of the doubts that arose in my mind as I read the essay. Is there really demonstrable evidence that climate change has diverted resources that would have once gone to what Franzen conceives of as “pure” conservation activities? Is there really a division between the two?

The nut of Franzen’s argument is that such a cleavage does exist: that climate change is a “done deal,” and that, in the absence of the kind of intergovernmental efforts that are required to make a real dent in climate trends (sorry, Prius drivers), we ought to do more to mitigate its immediate efforts. As Franzen puts it, “We can dam every river and blight every landscape with biofuel agriculture, solar farms, and wind turbines, to buy some extra years of moderated warming. Or we can settle for a shorter life of higher quality, protecting the areas where wild animals and plants are hanging on, at the cost of slightly hastening the human catastrophe.”

This dichotomy in turn rests on an argument about human nature, an argument that I found compelling. Basically, it goes like this: we now know that climate change is so large a problem that only massive governmental action can make a difference. This knowledge, coupled with the abstract quality of climate change that Franzen rightly identifies, makes us somewhat fatalistic about the prospects of reversing the effects of global warming: Governments aren’t likely to act, so what can I meaningfully do about rising tides and melting glaciers? The answer, of course, is nothing—and the cruel joke is that my indifference is precisely what makes my government less likely to act (and the American government is the key player here; without meaningful action by the United States on carbon emissions, the international community isn’t likely to do much). As Franzen writes, summarizing Dale Jamieson’s book “Reason in a Dark Time,” “…America’s inaction on climate change is the result of democracy. A good democracy, after all, acts in the interests of its citizens, and it’s precisely the citizens of the major carbon-emitting democracies who benefit from cheap gasoline and global trade, while the main costs of our polluting are borne by those who have no vote: poorer countries, future generations, other species. The Amercan electorate, in other words, is rationally self-interested.” 

This is a cruel spiral in which to be trapped, and if my own experience is any indication, Franzen is right about the despair that this helplessness can engender. In high school, when I’d been reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s landmark New Yorker essays about the impending catastrophe of climate change, I believed that if we all just recycled and drove hybrids, everything would be all right. Today, I understand the utter futility of that position. (“The problem here,” Franzen says, “is that it makes no difference to the climate whether any individual…drives to work or rides a bike.”) I still recycle, but without the hope that used to accompany dropping my completed New Yorkers into the blue bin.

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling powerless against climate change, and this is what makes Franzen’s argument so hypnotic. I agree with you that the high point of the essay—the point where Franzen, as one of our leading novelists, has something truly unique to contribute to the discussion around environmental decline—is Franzen’s discussion of the relative narrative characteristics of conservation and contra-climate change efforts. This is the kind of language that my English major self finds too often lacking in our scientific discourse (and, for what it’s worth, it’s the kind of language that you are uniquely equipped to bring to our scientific discourse, my multi-disciplinary friend).

Climate change, Franzen argues, is a “story [that] can be told in fewer than a hundred and forty characters: We’re taking carbon that used to be sequestered and putting it in the atmosphere, and unless we stop we’re fucked.”

This is the story I’ve succumbed to since high school. It’s both harder and easier to tell oneself this story, at once depressingly hopeless and perversely liberating. “Climate change is everyone’s fault—in other words, no one’s,” Franzen says.

But I wonder if Franzen is too quick to wave the flag of surrender. Of the three letters that the New Yorker printed in the April 20^th essay in response to the essay, one from Jane Alexander, an Audobon Board Member, caught my attention in particular. Alexander contends that “Climate change is not, as Franzen writes, an abstract idea. Each of us experiences global warming as a local, and visceral, phenomenon—as drought, typhoons, snow, melting ice, or rising tides.”

This story—the story of climate change as indeed my problem—is the story that is lost as soon as we get too sanguine about climate change as a fait accompli. By rehearsing this story—and, it should be noted, by only interviewing people in South America—Franzen inadvertently reinforces this story. The alternate tale—that no, I’m not off the hook, and that yes, climate change is touching my life in immediate, painful ways (in, for instance, the ways it affects the birds that nest in my back yard)—has yet to be told successfully, Al Gore’s efforts notwithstanding. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying to tell it.

*          *          *

Jim,

You’re right to point out that scientific prose often lacks in storytelling quality. But in most cases, this is intentional—scientists’ skepticism makes them very cautious about adopting a narrative to explain the data. Only with extensive testing and independent confirmation do they begin to believe in their own stories. Certainly without having hunches, no one would try anything new. But unlike you and me (I don’t feel like I’ve earned my science stripes quite yet), these people ruthlessly poke holes in their own ideas for the sake of trying to get at realities outside themselves. These realities can be boring, bizarre, or otherwise counter-intuitive. Often, telling a story too early, even a good one, can lead to a wrong conclusion.

The task of a science communicator writing for a broad audience, I suppose, is to tell a story about what we know so far, or how we’ve gotten where we are, without trampling over the uncertainty that remains. And while narrative can be crucial, I think the currency of science communication is metaphor—that bridge between what readers know and what they are about to imagine. As a poet and a science journalist, I’m intensely interested in this bridge.

And I think you have a great point about the essay that still needs to be written about climate change in our backyards. I wonder if you’d agree with me that the reasons for this lack have to do with our imperial economics. Like debilitating manual labor, we’ve outsourced the current effects of climate change to developing nations and impoverished regions: the tropics, Siberia, the lower 9^th ward of New Orleans. Its most immediate effects (increased storm frequencies, higher average temperatures, and sea level rises) are not felt in the temperate climate of Franzen’s backyard, but are felt in real ways on the margins—in latitudinal extremes and the tropics. So even though science doesn’t work that way, perhaps Don Alberto does know more about climate change on an experience level than you or I.

Forest Park or Des Peres Floodplain?

A Red-winged Blackbird on Truman's campus this fall.

In my latest column for the Index, I use the history of Forest Park in Saint Louis as a way to talk about the value of urban wetlands, and as a way to introduce my wetland bird research to the community. Also, here's the scintillating essay about Forest Park by Dr. Allen, a Wash.U. architectural historian and urban preservationist, that I cite in the column. 

A Brief History of the Die-in

As a student of historical nonviolent movements, the protests in Saint Louis have an academic as well as a personal connection for me. In particular, I am interested in the language of protest. It can differ greatly by location and time period. In many places, a particular color has a deeply woven cultural meaning of resistance—yellow in the Phillipines, green in Iran, orange in Ukraine. In other movements, a particular kind of demonstration has become the signature of the movement—the boycotts and marches in the Civil Rights movement, the salt tax protests in the Indian independence movement, and the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo’s Arab Spring. However, these different forms of language have a similar goal: by wearing a certain color or taking a particular action in a highly public manner, nonviolent protesters aim to demonstrate their rejection of an unjust system, and the system’s inability to stop them from doing so without resorting to violence.

So far, the signature action of the Ferguson protest movement, other than the ‘hands up’ gesture, has been the die-in. As organizations have begun to struggle for control of the leadership of the current movement, I think it is important to bear witness to the Saint Louis roots of this particular demonstration. It is also a fascinating case-study in the spread of nonviolent tactics and the results of activism.

A little over a week before the grand jury decision announcement, Saint Louis-based activist groups were continuing their months-long campaign of protest. Though cable news attention had waned once the minority of criminally violent demonstrators had moved on, nonviolent protests continued unabated from August to November, with a peak of activity on the weekend of Oct. 11-12, dubbed “Ferguson October.”

According to the St. Louis American, on the afternoon of Sunday, Nov. 16, two groups of protesters, including members of Tribe X and Missourians Organizing for Reform (MORE) marched in University City, meeting in front of the Tivoli Theater on the Delmar Loop. After several minutes of chanting, some of them mimed holding a gun and shooting the others, who fell to the ground. Others traced chalk outlines around the ‘bodies.’ Laying in the street for 4.5 minutes, they mimicked the 4.5 hours that Michael Brown’s body lay on Canfield Ave. after he was shot. By blocking traffic and speaking over a megaphone to pedestrians, the protesters interrupted daily life and the normal flow of commerce in a business district. Delmar Blvd. is also culturally significant, as it represents the current line of segregation between white and black neighborhoods in St. Louis, according to the BBC (also see this write-up by the St. Louis Beacon). The Loop, therefore, is a liminal space in which this segregation can be challenged.

Video by the St. Louis American.

That evening, just hours after the protesters had dispersed, the New York Times put a photo of the die-in on the website’s front page.

Suddenly, the die-in was on track to spread virally. The Monday edition of the Times also featured this photo. However, it is important to consider that the activists strategically manipulated to get national coverage of this action. While the cable cameras had retreated, newspaper reporters from the Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times remained. By beginning with a march, they made sure the reporters knew where they were headed. They chose a highly photogenic action that looks good on a front page and is easily replicated by other groups. Though these choices, the organizers created conditions that nearly ensured national attention.

Since then, the die-in has spread nationwide. Most recently, medical students around the country held campus die-ins while wearing their white coats.  They often target highly-trafficked spots such as malls, large roads and interstates, and public squares.

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, Nick Pistor, recently claimed on Twitter that the die-in “has officially become a pop culture thing.” I think there is an important distinction between “widespread” and “pop culture.” Pop culture is never dangerous. Demonstrators, especially people of color, take very real risks participating in die-ins, ranging from verbal abuse, to arrest for unlawful assembly, to violent police response. The Saint Louis activists created a word in the language of the current movement that, wherever spoken, continues to challenge racism and promote solidarity among groups throughout the country.

Nine Haiku

For your diversion, or perhaps your distraction from evening work: Phizzog Review, led by our own Hart L'Ecuyer, was good enough to publish some haiku I wrote during a haiku frenzy in our writing workshop this spring. And they're alongside (well, below) a series of cicada haikus by Matthew Rohrer, a widely published writer. Check 'em out. 

Note - both sets of haiku are non-traditional: they don't all have 5-7-5 syllable structure. Mine do only when convenient. In this I am following Robert Hass's lead. He translated hundreds of classic haiku and sought dynamic recreations in English rather than literal replications.