Saturday, April 14, 2012
Dew
You can watch a meadow mist
An early morning to the day
But have you stopped to wonder how
It ever got that way?
A blanketing of moisture on
An simple field of grass
That rodents dig and crickets chew
And vagrants dare trespass
But it first takes a darkling purge
To leave behind a dew
That wets the leaves and lifts the stems
And starts the world anew
Friday, March 30, 2012
Ask a Ranger
One of the best ways to learn about the natural world is to ask an expert for help. Even experienced naturalists can benefit from talking with local amateurs that know their corner of the world better than others can ever hope to.
You might visit a state or national park and ask a ranger about what you might expect to see. There is, of course, the occasional distracted or misanthropic employee that will not bother to engage your curiosity. But these kinds of people are not the rule. Most rangers are living their dream, of making a living around nature, and love nothing more than to tell you about it.
My advice is to start with a state park that doesn’t get inundated with weekend visitors. You might even decide to visit during the middle of the week. Nature has a funny way of showing herself a little more willingly when there aren’t so many people around. And you will be more likely to find someone with time to talk. If you’re lucky you may even get a tour.
Several years ago Erik, Michael and I were visiting Merchant’s Millpond State Park in the coastal area of North Carolina. It was late in the year and most of the leaves were gone from the trees. Only pine needles and a few brown beech leaves were all that were left on the trees. The forest was mostly a latticework of bare branches.
As we were finishing our dinner a ranger came by to check on us. It was obvious that he was less interested in our camping fee than in our experience at the park. There was almost nobody else around and he was curious why we had visited. I told him that we were just out to enjoy the forest and to look for birds. I told him that I was also an entomologist and that, believe it or not, insects could be found at such times if you knew where to look.
One thing led to another and we soon learned that Merchant’s Millpond State Park was one of the buggiest places on earth – a real find for someone that likes insects. Our new ranger friend told us about hoards of mosquitoes, deer flies and ticks that kept a lot of people away. But he also told us that were ways to avoid these pests. He then told us about some of the real treasures of the park. When we returned a few months later, he realized that we really appreciated our visit. He then invited us to come back and join him and his wife on a canoe trip into the remote areas of the swamp.
This was a trip the three of us will never forget. The canoe ride was, by itself, a new experience for Michael and he learned the art of paddling fairly quickly. We were surrounded by large cypress trees and there were dozens of turtles sunning themselves on half-submerged logs. Duckweed and pond lilies were abundant in the water and kingfishers, cormorants and herons watched us from their many riparian perches.
An hour into our trip took us to a narrow arm of the swamp. Swollen cypress trunks supported an arching canopy overhead. And then we saw our first water snake. It was sunning itself on a bush like a string of tinsel on a Christmas tree, and completely surrounded by water.
Then we started seeing snakes more regularly. Some of them were water moccasins, a beautiful yet venomous snake of southern wetlands. I knew this species lived in wet areas but I was not prepared for the surprise of seeing one swim. At times, individual snakes would start across the water in a zigzagging pattern just as if they were moving across the forest floor. Our ranger friend picked one up right out of the water with a paddle, showing no more concern than if he were picking up a floating piece of wood.
Then Erik and Michael were given flashlights, taken to a few hollow trees and (quietly), shown some of the rarely seen native bats sleeping upside down inside the cavity. Our most memorable moment was the alligator that we saw on our way back. It was first noticed by the ranger’s wife in a deep part of the swamp surrounded by duckweed. Things got a little interesting even after we stopped paddling and our momentum brought us to within a few feet of the reptile. It was one of those intense moments you don’t forget. For its part, the alligator hardly paid us any attention.
There are a lot of great nature moments that you will miss unless you ask a ranger what to be on the lookout for. Nature abides by her own time schedule and living things behave differently depending on where they occur. You may walk all the way through a park and see only common species if you only follow your own advice. And you may pass within minutes of a real treasure that you didn’t even know was there.
Some years ago I travelled with my friend Steve to Amherst Island on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario. We went during January and the countryside was covered in snow. The ferry from Millhaven (on the mainland) to Stella (on the island) took less than half an hour. The lake was choppy and the sky was gray – as it often is during the winter. But we arrived in good spirits, eager to see some of the island’s birds.
We were particularly looking for snowy owls that were known to come to the island in the winter. One doesn’t expect to see owls in the middle of the day. Owls, after all, are nocturnal – or so we suppose. In fact northern owls do not always follow this rule. Living in a land that experiences long periods of darkness and long periods of light, they make use of hunting opportunities as they present themselves, irrespective of light.
After a bit of driving around we found our first one. They were resting on the ground on top of the snow – white balls of feathers with dark flecks on their wings. They were wary and we kept our distance. As we became more familiar with the island, we learned that there was plenty for them to eat. In fact Amherst Island is home to several owls. Saw-whet owls, long eared owls, short-eared owls, barred owls, snowy owls and boreal owls can be seen there on a regular basis.
But our most exciting find was the northern hawk owl that we found the following day on the mainland a few miles east of Millhaven. This is a northern owl that is rarely seen anywhere near the United States. In fact you have to really know where to look to even see one in Canada. I have spoken to many birders (much more experienced than I am) that have never seen one.
The only reason we were so fortunate was because of Steve’s connections to the birding community in the area. During our second day on the island, Steve received a message that one had been spotted not far from Millhaven. We quickly changed our plans and drove to the spot as quickly as we could. After driving on many back roads, we finally found it – perched happily on a telephone line looking for signs of rodents.
There are people all around you – both where you live and where you might travel on vacation – that know where interesting species might be seen. They can make the difference between an average walk in the woods and an unforgettable wildlife experience.
If you happen to be visiting an undeveloped country, however, finding somebody to talk with about nature can be a challenge. Most of the parks you might want to visit will not have rangers or guides on staff. In fact there may not even be accessible hiking trails. Many countries are making the wise decision to protect wild areas but lack the funds to employ the help they need.
A good alternative is to contact one of the many ecotourism groups scattered throughout the world. You will want to do your homework or you will certainly pay more than you might like. But the time you spend will be worth the effort.
Some years ago while visiting Costa Rica, we found ourselves on the Osa Peninsula looking for insects and other kinds of wildlife. The area is a rich lowland tropical forest and we were amazed by the species diversity. There were brightly colored tortoise beetles and lizards that “walk” on water (and that are considered Christian lizards as a result). Giant fig trees lined the roads and many bird species that I couldn’t identify were flying all around.
It was easy to let the day get away from us. Evening came much sooner than expected. We had been hoping to find a place to camp but couldn’t even find a side road that would accommodate a tent. In the end we pulled into an eco-lodge and paid several hundred dollars for a single night’s sleep. I wasn’t very happy about this but made the best of it.
Then, when we discovered that a nature guide was taking a group out the next morning, we decided to sign up and go along. It turned out to be the highlight of our trip. We hadn’t even made it out of the small parking area before we saw a sloth high up in a tree – sitting with its back to us and otherwise motionless. If it knew we were there, it made no sign of it. We watched it do nothing for quite a while and then moved on.
Through the course of the morning we saw howler monkeys, spider monkeys, and squirrel monkeys. There were iguanas and other lizards. We found a second sloth and an eagle flying high above. Jaçanas, woodpeckers and macaws (along with many other species) kept our binoculars constantly at our fingertips. And all of these were seen from the same road that we had just travelled on the day before. The big difference was that our guide knew where to look and what to expect.
Now allow me to change subjects momentarily and bring your attention to a new awareness that is happening in many fields these days. Health care providers are slowly waking up to the fact that nature has a much more profound effect on our sense of wellbeing than previously realized. Mental health professionals are now prescribing nature walks and other therapies that take patients to parks, arboreta and other natural areas. More and more hospitals are being built with natural places for patients to enjoy. Even school teachers are finding that energetic students will be better behaved if they are taken outside and exposed to nature.
One of my favorite recent findings is the work done by Reese Nelson on college students taking standardized math exams. He placed house plants in one area of a testing center and kept another area without plants. He found that students taking the exam near plants not only did better on the exams but that their stress levels were less too.
These new findings might seem obvious or intuitive to those of us that have been seeking natural places all our lives. Yet these formal efforts are bringing the importance of nature to a wider group – a group with decision-making potential. The reason that I bring this up is because now, more than ever before, you can find park rangers and informed amateur naturalists that are willing to go the extra mile and accommodate your interest in the natural world. It is now becoming a civic service in many places, not just a habit of a few hobbyists.
Daphne Miller (a general practitioner in San Francisco) was recently made aware of the impact conscientious rangers made after visiting a conference where she heard of the work of some rangers in Yosemite National Park in California. The rangers had realized the positive effects the park was making on the mental health of many visitors and were working to meet their needs. Miller’s work, recognizing the larger utility of this finding, is being called “ranger therapy” in some quarters. In fact, there are rangers that have now been trained to provide “nature prescriptions” to visitors that need this kind of natural medicine.
Now I realize that this may sound a bit odd to some – somewhat like the psychotic and well-heeled city slicker asking the happy country bumpkin for help with a flat tire. I don’t intend it that way. I think we should take the natural world more seriously than this. Those that have made career decisions to be in nature have, for a long time, lived on lower incomes than many of us. And the reality is that their efforts have often been ignored or trivialized. It’s a positive thing that we begin to recognize the importance of their work.
The more we ask these natural experts for help, the more we promote the natural world that they represent. Asking for their advice is the best part of their job. It will also help you make the most out your time in nature.
References
Daphne Miller’s reference to ranger therapy is in Richard Louv’s, The Nature Principle (see page 82), published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2011. Nelson’s University of Idaho dissertation on the effects of testing center plants (Mitigating stress in college students by enhancing testing center environments through passive interaction with plants) can be found on the UMI website (http://gradworks.umi.com/32/20/3220450.html - accessed 3/27/12).
You might visit a state or national park and ask a ranger about what you might expect to see. There is, of course, the occasional distracted or misanthropic employee that will not bother to engage your curiosity. But these kinds of people are not the rule. Most rangers are living their dream, of making a living around nature, and love nothing more than to tell you about it.
My advice is to start with a state park that doesn’t get inundated with weekend visitors. You might even decide to visit during the middle of the week. Nature has a funny way of showing herself a little more willingly when there aren’t so many people around. And you will be more likely to find someone with time to talk. If you’re lucky you may even get a tour.
Several years ago Erik, Michael and I were visiting Merchant’s Millpond State Park in the coastal area of North Carolina. It was late in the year and most of the leaves were gone from the trees. Only pine needles and a few brown beech leaves were all that were left on the trees. The forest was mostly a latticework of bare branches.
As we were finishing our dinner a ranger came by to check on us. It was obvious that he was less interested in our camping fee than in our experience at the park. There was almost nobody else around and he was curious why we had visited. I told him that we were just out to enjoy the forest and to look for birds. I told him that I was also an entomologist and that, believe it or not, insects could be found at such times if you knew where to look.
One thing led to another and we soon learned that Merchant’s Millpond State Park was one of the buggiest places on earth – a real find for someone that likes insects. Our new ranger friend told us about hoards of mosquitoes, deer flies and ticks that kept a lot of people away. But he also told us that were ways to avoid these pests. He then told us about some of the real treasures of the park. When we returned a few months later, he realized that we really appreciated our visit. He then invited us to come back and join him and his wife on a canoe trip into the remote areas of the swamp.
This was a trip the three of us will never forget. The canoe ride was, by itself, a new experience for Michael and he learned the art of paddling fairly quickly. We were surrounded by large cypress trees and there were dozens of turtles sunning themselves on half-submerged logs. Duckweed and pond lilies were abundant in the water and kingfishers, cormorants and herons watched us from their many riparian perches.
An hour into our trip took us to a narrow arm of the swamp. Swollen cypress trunks supported an arching canopy overhead. And then we saw our first water snake. It was sunning itself on a bush like a string of tinsel on a Christmas tree, and completely surrounded by water.
Then we started seeing snakes more regularly. Some of them were water moccasins, a beautiful yet venomous snake of southern wetlands. I knew this species lived in wet areas but I was not prepared for the surprise of seeing one swim. At times, individual snakes would start across the water in a zigzagging pattern just as if they were moving across the forest floor. Our ranger friend picked one up right out of the water with a paddle, showing no more concern than if he were picking up a floating piece of wood.
Then Erik and Michael were given flashlights, taken to a few hollow trees and (quietly), shown some of the rarely seen native bats sleeping upside down inside the cavity. Our most memorable moment was the alligator that we saw on our way back. It was first noticed by the ranger’s wife in a deep part of the swamp surrounded by duckweed. Things got a little interesting even after we stopped paddling and our momentum brought us to within a few feet of the reptile. It was one of those intense moments you don’t forget. For its part, the alligator hardly paid us any attention.
There are a lot of great nature moments that you will miss unless you ask a ranger what to be on the lookout for. Nature abides by her own time schedule and living things behave differently depending on where they occur. You may walk all the way through a park and see only common species if you only follow your own advice. And you may pass within minutes of a real treasure that you didn’t even know was there.
Some years ago I travelled with my friend Steve to Amherst Island on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario. We went during January and the countryside was covered in snow. The ferry from Millhaven (on the mainland) to Stella (on the island) took less than half an hour. The lake was choppy and the sky was gray – as it often is during the winter. But we arrived in good spirits, eager to see some of the island’s birds.
We were particularly looking for snowy owls that were known to come to the island in the winter. One doesn’t expect to see owls in the middle of the day. Owls, after all, are nocturnal – or so we suppose. In fact northern owls do not always follow this rule. Living in a land that experiences long periods of darkness and long periods of light, they make use of hunting opportunities as they present themselves, irrespective of light.
After a bit of driving around we found our first one. They were resting on the ground on top of the snow – white balls of feathers with dark flecks on their wings. They were wary and we kept our distance. As we became more familiar with the island, we learned that there was plenty for them to eat. In fact Amherst Island is home to several owls. Saw-whet owls, long eared owls, short-eared owls, barred owls, snowy owls and boreal owls can be seen there on a regular basis.
But our most exciting find was the northern hawk owl that we found the following day on the mainland a few miles east of Millhaven. This is a northern owl that is rarely seen anywhere near the United States. In fact you have to really know where to look to even see one in Canada. I have spoken to many birders (much more experienced than I am) that have never seen one.
The only reason we were so fortunate was because of Steve’s connections to the birding community in the area. During our second day on the island, Steve received a message that one had been spotted not far from Millhaven. We quickly changed our plans and drove to the spot as quickly as we could. After driving on many back roads, we finally found it – perched happily on a telephone line looking for signs of rodents.
There are people all around you – both where you live and where you might travel on vacation – that know where interesting species might be seen. They can make the difference between an average walk in the woods and an unforgettable wildlife experience.
If you happen to be visiting an undeveloped country, however, finding somebody to talk with about nature can be a challenge. Most of the parks you might want to visit will not have rangers or guides on staff. In fact there may not even be accessible hiking trails. Many countries are making the wise decision to protect wild areas but lack the funds to employ the help they need.
A good alternative is to contact one of the many ecotourism groups scattered throughout the world. You will want to do your homework or you will certainly pay more than you might like. But the time you spend will be worth the effort.
Some years ago while visiting Costa Rica, we found ourselves on the Osa Peninsula looking for insects and other kinds of wildlife. The area is a rich lowland tropical forest and we were amazed by the species diversity. There were brightly colored tortoise beetles and lizards that “walk” on water (and that are considered Christian lizards as a result). Giant fig trees lined the roads and many bird species that I couldn’t identify were flying all around.
It was easy to let the day get away from us. Evening came much sooner than expected. We had been hoping to find a place to camp but couldn’t even find a side road that would accommodate a tent. In the end we pulled into an eco-lodge and paid several hundred dollars for a single night’s sleep. I wasn’t very happy about this but made the best of it.
Then, when we discovered that a nature guide was taking a group out the next morning, we decided to sign up and go along. It turned out to be the highlight of our trip. We hadn’t even made it out of the small parking area before we saw a sloth high up in a tree – sitting with its back to us and otherwise motionless. If it knew we were there, it made no sign of it. We watched it do nothing for quite a while and then moved on.
Through the course of the morning we saw howler monkeys, spider monkeys, and squirrel monkeys. There were iguanas and other lizards. We found a second sloth and an eagle flying high above. Jaçanas, woodpeckers and macaws (along with many other species) kept our binoculars constantly at our fingertips. And all of these were seen from the same road that we had just travelled on the day before. The big difference was that our guide knew where to look and what to expect.
Now allow me to change subjects momentarily and bring your attention to a new awareness that is happening in many fields these days. Health care providers are slowly waking up to the fact that nature has a much more profound effect on our sense of wellbeing than previously realized. Mental health professionals are now prescribing nature walks and other therapies that take patients to parks, arboreta and other natural areas. More and more hospitals are being built with natural places for patients to enjoy. Even school teachers are finding that energetic students will be better behaved if they are taken outside and exposed to nature.
One of my favorite recent findings is the work done by Reese Nelson on college students taking standardized math exams. He placed house plants in one area of a testing center and kept another area without plants. He found that students taking the exam near plants not only did better on the exams but that their stress levels were less too.
These new findings might seem obvious or intuitive to those of us that have been seeking natural places all our lives. Yet these formal efforts are bringing the importance of nature to a wider group – a group with decision-making potential. The reason that I bring this up is because now, more than ever before, you can find park rangers and informed amateur naturalists that are willing to go the extra mile and accommodate your interest in the natural world. It is now becoming a civic service in many places, not just a habit of a few hobbyists.
Daphne Miller (a general practitioner in San Francisco) was recently made aware of the impact conscientious rangers made after visiting a conference where she heard of the work of some rangers in Yosemite National Park in California. The rangers had realized the positive effects the park was making on the mental health of many visitors and were working to meet their needs. Miller’s work, recognizing the larger utility of this finding, is being called “ranger therapy” in some quarters. In fact, there are rangers that have now been trained to provide “nature prescriptions” to visitors that need this kind of natural medicine.
Now I realize that this may sound a bit odd to some – somewhat like the psychotic and well-heeled city slicker asking the happy country bumpkin for help with a flat tire. I don’t intend it that way. I think we should take the natural world more seriously than this. Those that have made career decisions to be in nature have, for a long time, lived on lower incomes than many of us. And the reality is that their efforts have often been ignored or trivialized. It’s a positive thing that we begin to recognize the importance of their work.
The more we ask these natural experts for help, the more we promote the natural world that they represent. Asking for their advice is the best part of their job. It will also help you make the most out your time in nature.
References
Daphne Miller’s reference to ranger therapy is in Richard Louv’s, The Nature Principle (see page 82), published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2011. Nelson’s University of Idaho dissertation on the effects of testing center plants (Mitigating stress in college students by enhancing testing center environments through passive interaction with plants) can be found on the UMI website (http://gradworks.umi.com/32/20/3220450.html - accessed 3/27/12).
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Review of 1493 by Charles Mann
We live in a post-Columbian world that is losing its truly local cultures. It is common for people like me, with only a middle-management job, to travel internationally and to see places very different from the community I grew up in. More and more of us are doing this now – in spite of recent economic troubles. At least in the business community we have become a global culture. This is good for business but it is also harming the earth’s ecosystems. Our impact on the planet has been, and continues to be, immense. Charles Mann’s recent book 1493 is an account of some of these impacts.
This is a companion volume to Mann’s book 1491 that took a close look at the New World before Columbus. What strikes me most about these two books is the broader historic perspective they provide of the human impact to earth. Mann makes a convincing argument that it is much greater than we realize.
One of the things we learn about in 1491, for example, is that the huge populations of buffalo and passenger pigeons, that struck early colonists with such amazement, were unusually high because their human predators had previously been reduced by disease. These diseases in turn had come via immigrants from the Old World. The unrecognized reality in America before Columbus, it seems, was a much larger human population than we thought. And the corollary is that the Americas were greatly impacted by the European discovery of the New World.
In 1493 we get to see the reverse of this. We get to see how the entire planet has changed because of post-Columbian globalization. The crux of the issue is apparent in Michael Samway’s important term Homogenocene which Mann introduces to readers. Apparently meant to look like a name for a geological epoch, the homogenocene depicts a modern world with reduced biodiversity and an increasingly global human culture. Mann does a good job of showing us just what this homogenocene looks like.
We are all aware of the popularity of American tobacco in Europe after Columbus, for example. Most of us also have an inkling of the influence that malaria and other insect-borne diseases had on the New World as well. Mann’s treatment of these examples is probing and up-to-date. You were wrong if you thought you knew all there was to know about these, and other, stories from your college geography class of yesteryear. A lot has been learned since then. Did you know, for instance, that even though all American colonies had slaves, those that suffered from malaria had more?
Other examples include the introduction of sweet potatoes and maize into China. It is not unusual to learn that both crops were popular in many places around the world. What comes as a sobering surprise is that they had large ecological effects in China early on even as they fed a growing population. Both crops could be grown in upland areas, unlike rice that was grown almost exclusively in valleys. But along with the cultivation of these uplands came the removal of forests and serious erosion became a problem. These same issues remain a serious problem today. Mann’s treatment of the effects of rubber production is a classic modern example.
The influence of the American potato on the world’s hungry has also been immense. We know this. But the history of the potato and its influence on the agro-industrial complex will be news to many. It will probably also come as a shock to some that these examples of the Columbian Exchange are an important part (perhaps the most important part) of why China is the most populous nation in the world today. Mann’s book helps us realize just how much globalization affects our lives – much more than most of us realized.
There are a few mistakes in the book. Mann seems unaware of the diversity of American worms. And he writes that tuberculosis did not exist in America before Columbus - it did. But his discussion of these issues is of minor importance and hardly a distraction.
In contrast, one of Mann’s strengths is his thoroughness. His footnotes and endnotes (yes, he uses both, and to surprisingly good effect) are full of fascinating tidbits. We learn that Ireland may have known about the New World before Columbus and that the Chinese used scale insects to make a low-quality wax for candles. This is a book that will reward student and scholar alike.
Yet, in spite of a very worthy effort, Mann does not tell us what we really want to know: about what we should do with this predicament that globalization has left us in. I don’t think that this is a political convenience. Mann both annoys and encourages environmental as well as business interests. He is eminently fair and describes the world as he sees it. But are we better armed to face the troubling future? I don’t think so.
Certainly we are better informed, and if this is all that Mann set out to do then he was successful. But this is a shame, nonetheless. If we can’t get a prescription from an objective and credible observer like Mann, than one wonders what real solutions we’ll ever find at all.
Do we continue, as is, with our quarantines? What is the correct role of international trade? Do global values trump other, more regional, belief systems? What does a fair comparison between global and local cultures tell us? Is globalization going to change (or is it even possible) with limited and dwindling per capita resources?
It’s difficult to know. We live in challenging times – when the world in turn lies open before us and intrudes itself upon us. Wise decisions are needed even as they are hard to find. My own suggestion is a simple one: hope for the best but plan for the worst. I mean that local communities should become more sustainable. It’s important that we get over our destructive prejudices and love all of God’s children. And it’s nice to say that we either sink or swim together. But the truth is that the earth is a planet not a boat. How do we save our earth when we neglect our own neighborhoods? We can start improving the world by loving our neighbors and our own human habitats. I think if you read 1493 you’ll agree with me.
References
Samway’s article Translocating Faunas to Foreign Lands: Here comes the Homogenocene was published (1999) in the Journal of Insect Conservation 3(2):65-66.
This is a companion volume to Mann’s book 1491 that took a close look at the New World before Columbus. What strikes me most about these two books is the broader historic perspective they provide of the human impact to earth. Mann makes a convincing argument that it is much greater than we realize.
One of the things we learn about in 1491, for example, is that the huge populations of buffalo and passenger pigeons, that struck early colonists with such amazement, were unusually high because their human predators had previously been reduced by disease. These diseases in turn had come via immigrants from the Old World. The unrecognized reality in America before Columbus, it seems, was a much larger human population than we thought. And the corollary is that the Americas were greatly impacted by the European discovery of the New World.
In 1493 we get to see the reverse of this. We get to see how the entire planet has changed because of post-Columbian globalization. The crux of the issue is apparent in Michael Samway’s important term Homogenocene which Mann introduces to readers. Apparently meant to look like a name for a geological epoch, the homogenocene depicts a modern world with reduced biodiversity and an increasingly global human culture. Mann does a good job of showing us just what this homogenocene looks like.
We are all aware of the popularity of American tobacco in Europe after Columbus, for example. Most of us also have an inkling of the influence that malaria and other insect-borne diseases had on the New World as well. Mann’s treatment of these examples is probing and up-to-date. You were wrong if you thought you knew all there was to know about these, and other, stories from your college geography class of yesteryear. A lot has been learned since then. Did you know, for instance, that even though all American colonies had slaves, those that suffered from malaria had more?
Other examples include the introduction of sweet potatoes and maize into China. It is not unusual to learn that both crops were popular in many places around the world. What comes as a sobering surprise is that they had large ecological effects in China early on even as they fed a growing population. Both crops could be grown in upland areas, unlike rice that was grown almost exclusively in valleys. But along with the cultivation of these uplands came the removal of forests and serious erosion became a problem. These same issues remain a serious problem today. Mann’s treatment of the effects of rubber production is a classic modern example.
The influence of the American potato on the world’s hungry has also been immense. We know this. But the history of the potato and its influence on the agro-industrial complex will be news to many. It will probably also come as a shock to some that these examples of the Columbian Exchange are an important part (perhaps the most important part) of why China is the most populous nation in the world today. Mann’s book helps us realize just how much globalization affects our lives – much more than most of us realized.
There are a few mistakes in the book. Mann seems unaware of the diversity of American worms. And he writes that tuberculosis did not exist in America before Columbus - it did. But his discussion of these issues is of minor importance and hardly a distraction.
In contrast, one of Mann’s strengths is his thoroughness. His footnotes and endnotes (yes, he uses both, and to surprisingly good effect) are full of fascinating tidbits. We learn that Ireland may have known about the New World before Columbus and that the Chinese used scale insects to make a low-quality wax for candles. This is a book that will reward student and scholar alike.
Yet, in spite of a very worthy effort, Mann does not tell us what we really want to know: about what we should do with this predicament that globalization has left us in. I don’t think that this is a political convenience. Mann both annoys and encourages environmental as well as business interests. He is eminently fair and describes the world as he sees it. But are we better armed to face the troubling future? I don’t think so.
Certainly we are better informed, and if this is all that Mann set out to do then he was successful. But this is a shame, nonetheless. If we can’t get a prescription from an objective and credible observer like Mann, than one wonders what real solutions we’ll ever find at all.
Do we continue, as is, with our quarantines? What is the correct role of international trade? Do global values trump other, more regional, belief systems? What does a fair comparison between global and local cultures tell us? Is globalization going to change (or is it even possible) with limited and dwindling per capita resources?
It’s difficult to know. We live in challenging times – when the world in turn lies open before us and intrudes itself upon us. Wise decisions are needed even as they are hard to find. My own suggestion is a simple one: hope for the best but plan for the worst. I mean that local communities should become more sustainable. It’s important that we get over our destructive prejudices and love all of God’s children. And it’s nice to say that we either sink or swim together. But the truth is that the earth is a planet not a boat. How do we save our earth when we neglect our own neighborhoods? We can start improving the world by loving our neighbors and our own human habitats. I think if you read 1493 you’ll agree with me.
References
Samway’s article Translocating Faunas to Foreign Lands: Here comes the Homogenocene was published (1999) in the Journal of Insect Conservation 3(2):65-66.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Moroni and the Internet
In recent years a few noble souls have concerned themselves with the unpopular notion that the internet is changing the way we think. They aren’t really suggesting that we are getting dumber (although arguments are made that in fact we are - in both senses of the word) so much as that we are becoming less able to concentrate. Fewer and fewer people are able to follow a thread of thought, anymore, for any longer than it takes to scan a webpage.
Ours is a generation of cliff notes and the information segment. Not only are movie scenes much shorter than they used to be but our schools now regularly treat attention deficits as a treatable illness. Of course, we live in a faster-paced world and, some will argue, the nimble mind is now more important than an extended focus. Besides, we haven’t really become less intelligent, we’re just quicker and more competitive.
Well maybe – but then again, maybe not. Consider Christine Rosen’s recent argument that we no longer read online so much as we scan whatever happens to be on the screen in front of us. Web surfers rarely read the text on a webpage in the same way that we traditionally read a book. They jump from one paragraph or snippet to the next.
“Clicking on link after link, always looking for a new bit of information, we are actually revving up our brains with dopamine, the overlord of … the “seeking system”.” While connected to cyberspace the typical person deals with a combination of new incoming messages, quick responses to those messages, news updates, calendaring, planning, etc. All of these things (mediated by our dopamine-fueled system) “keep your brain constantly a bit distracted from what you’re reading online”.
We have become the masters of multitasking. Unfortunately, there seems to be a price to be paid for some of these associated virtues of our modern adaptability. We are losing the wisdom that comes from an extended focus and self-understanding that comes from personal rumination of the written word. We are becoming more superficial.
This problem is not entirely a product of the modern digital age. Daniel Boorstin noticed the trend in 1961 in his book, The Image. His point was that modern society was creating too many simple and convenient substitutes for the real world. He called these substitutes pseudo-events. And in the world of literature he noted the democratic trend to simplify important texts by abridgement.
Until recently, though, these abridgements (or “digests”) were written for specialists. With the success of The Readers’s Digest in the 20th Century, however, this began to change. Originally, the magazine was filled with condensed versions of other magazine articles. The founders (De Witt and Lila Wallace) at first just cut out sections of other magazine articles and reprinted their condensed versions. It wasn’t until much later that the magazine published its first full length article.
Boorstin noted about The Reader’s Digest, “This, the most popular magazine in the United States, has offered itself not as an “original,” but as a digest. The shadow outsells the substance. Abridging and digesting is no longer a device to lead the reader to an original which will give him what he really wants. The digest itself is what he wants. The shadow has become the substance.”
This worries me. It would seem that, by extension, an online snippet is even more removed from the substantial than even an abridgment. We are compounding superficiality, which wouldn’t be so bad if we restricted our scanning to practical expedients. It should be possible, after all, to capture a news update from our phone before settling down for a serious hour with Shakespeare. We should, in other words, be able to give priority to things that really matter even as we manage our superficial technologies. But are we really being so wise?
One of the great scriptural references in The Book of Mormon addresses this very issue. It is known among Mormons as The Book of Mormon Promise and is found at the end of The Book of Moroni (which is the last book in the The Book of Mormon). The preface to this promise begins in verse 3 of Chapter 10.
“Behold I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts.”
Now this scripture has been variously loved, ignored, and misunderstood by generations of Latter-day Saints. It tends to get missed by superficial readers – especially when the important verses that follow are underlined in red. But Moroni, who wrote for our time, seems to be zeroing in on this particular one of our modern mistakes – I mean our superficial reading (and scanning).
The first request is that we remember something. This is certainly not a skill that our technological age encourages. If anything, the internet tells us that we need no longer worry about remembering. Why should we? Everything we need to know is just a few clicks away.
And yet the great literature of the world has always required of us a bit of reflection. Russell Kirk writes that, “The mass of miscellaneous information thrust upon us already is overwhelming and dismaying. What we need is not more information; what we require, as a public, is the ability to discriminate and integrate that mass of information, and to reflect upon it”.
Then as the content of our remembering is processed (explains Moroni) we are to ponder upon its meaning in our hearts. It would seem that Moroni is asking us to be very intimate readers. This apparently simple verse is asking us to do something like the following: read a sacred text, familiarize ourselves with sacred history enough to be able to reflect upon it, then (once a rational understanding has been achieved) consider the deeper significance of what it means to us. Awareness is expected to go from the written word into our short term memory, then to our long-term memory, then to our hearts, and finally to change our lives. We are to process a thought through the brain, through the heart, and then through the will. This is not a process measured in megabytes and seconds. This is clearly a process of engaging a text and letting it inform and to change our lives.
What happens if we sunder this sequence to the soul? What happens if we re-train our minds to become efficient scanners without retaining our human-paced ability to reflect? I think we risk being deceived. We run the risk of finding ourselves spiritually, historically and humanely limited.
But in truth, we don’t know what our current literary neglect will do to us. One possibility is that we will only be less informed. Another possibility is that we will physically become less human. Consider the recent findings (reported by Nicholas Carr) of researchers studying the brains of London taxi drivers.
It turns out that those drivers with the most experience – those having driven the streets of London for decades – had enlarged areas of the brain. Their posterior hippocampus tended to be larger than normal. This change had developed because of an exaggerated need to navigate the intricate maze of streets in a large and complex metropolitan area. The authors of the study believe that this acquired ability also came with trade-offs. The size of the brain, it is believed, is only able to grow so much within a rigid adult skull. If one area gets bigger does this mean that an adjacent area must get smaller?
Or in other words, if we become master scanners, do we lose an existing (yet underutilized) ability like deeper reflection – something like gaining fat while losing muscle? Maybe we do, but we don’t know. I have more optimism in our God-given brains than to become alarmed over this anatomical issue. What does alarm me a great deal, however, is our ongoing cultural neglect of serious literature and the ability to seriously engage a text.
This ability is being neglected, for sure. Just take a few minutes and scan the literature on public education these days. Most of the discussion is over budgets, test scores, new legislation, technology, etc. Where is the serious thought about texts? Now, in order to save money, we even hear of proposals to eliminate many existing books from the classroom – relying on web-based alternatives instead.
We have every reason to be concerned about this. Take for instance Betsy Sparrow’s (et al.) recent findings in Science that the internet affects memory. In a series of experiments, students were tested on their ability to recall information under various situations. The researchers found that the ability to remember was significantly less when participants expected that they could find the information later online. What students where remembering, was how to access the information rather than on the information itself.
I think Moroni just might be a little concerned about this. Maybe it isn’t all that important whether or not we memorize the names of the Beatles, of every recipe we use, or every street name between hear and the airport. Let’s use our gadgets for such expedients. But let’s remember that it does matter if we’ve committed sacred texts to memory. It also matters whether or not we remember the main arguments of a political philosopher or of an observant historian. And how do we expect to make our lives better if we can’t even remember what an inspired leader taught us just a few months ago?
There were good reasons that our ancestors memorized texts. We are a bit surprised when we learn, for example, that a couple of hundred years ago, public speeches (often lasting many hours) were memorized by talented listeners and written down afterwards. We are sobered by the dedication of Muslims that memorize the Koran. And now that I’m not so far from being a senior citizen, I’m amazed that many of the long texts I memorized as a youth are still with me and inform my thinking to this day.
Memory and reflection go hand-in-hand. And the kinds of memories that really matter are the ones that we gather from important texts. If we get wired by engaging the digital world, then we need to know when to step away from it. We need time to stop and think. Moroni was keenly aware of this. In fact, who knows, he may have been looking right at us and our distracted selves shaking his head. It’s worth reflecting on just such a possibility.
References
Christine Rosen’s article In the Beginning Was the Word appeared in the Autumn, 2009 issue of the Wilson Quarterly (Volume 33(4):48-53). My copy of Daniel Boorstin’s book The Image, A Guide to Psuedo-Events in America was published by Vintage in 1987. Russell Kirk’s statement comes from Humane Learning in the Age of the Computer, found (as Chapter IX) in Redeeming the Time, published by ISI Books in 1999 (second printing). For the account of the London taxi drivers and the issue of brain changes caused by the internet, see The Shallows, what the internet is doing to our brains by Nicholas Carr (published by W.W. Norton & Company, 2010). For Betsy Sparrow’s (et al.) article see: Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at our Fingertips, Science, 333, pp. 776-778 (2011).
Ours is a generation of cliff notes and the information segment. Not only are movie scenes much shorter than they used to be but our schools now regularly treat attention deficits as a treatable illness. Of course, we live in a faster-paced world and, some will argue, the nimble mind is now more important than an extended focus. Besides, we haven’t really become less intelligent, we’re just quicker and more competitive.
Well maybe – but then again, maybe not. Consider Christine Rosen’s recent argument that we no longer read online so much as we scan whatever happens to be on the screen in front of us. Web surfers rarely read the text on a webpage in the same way that we traditionally read a book. They jump from one paragraph or snippet to the next.
“Clicking on link after link, always looking for a new bit of information, we are actually revving up our brains with dopamine, the overlord of … the “seeking system”.” While connected to cyberspace the typical person deals with a combination of new incoming messages, quick responses to those messages, news updates, calendaring, planning, etc. All of these things (mediated by our dopamine-fueled system) “keep your brain constantly a bit distracted from what you’re reading online”.
We have become the masters of multitasking. Unfortunately, there seems to be a price to be paid for some of these associated virtues of our modern adaptability. We are losing the wisdom that comes from an extended focus and self-understanding that comes from personal rumination of the written word. We are becoming more superficial.
This problem is not entirely a product of the modern digital age. Daniel Boorstin noticed the trend in 1961 in his book, The Image. His point was that modern society was creating too many simple and convenient substitutes for the real world. He called these substitutes pseudo-events. And in the world of literature he noted the democratic trend to simplify important texts by abridgement.
Until recently, though, these abridgements (or “digests”) were written for specialists. With the success of The Readers’s Digest in the 20th Century, however, this began to change. Originally, the magazine was filled with condensed versions of other magazine articles. The founders (De Witt and Lila Wallace) at first just cut out sections of other magazine articles and reprinted their condensed versions. It wasn’t until much later that the magazine published its first full length article.
Boorstin noted about The Reader’s Digest, “This, the most popular magazine in the United States, has offered itself not as an “original,” but as a digest. The shadow outsells the substance. Abridging and digesting is no longer a device to lead the reader to an original which will give him what he really wants. The digest itself is what he wants. The shadow has become the substance.”
This worries me. It would seem that, by extension, an online snippet is even more removed from the substantial than even an abridgment. We are compounding superficiality, which wouldn’t be so bad if we restricted our scanning to practical expedients. It should be possible, after all, to capture a news update from our phone before settling down for a serious hour with Shakespeare. We should, in other words, be able to give priority to things that really matter even as we manage our superficial technologies. But are we really being so wise?
One of the great scriptural references in The Book of Mormon addresses this very issue. It is known among Mormons as The Book of Mormon Promise and is found at the end of The Book of Moroni (which is the last book in the The Book of Mormon). The preface to this promise begins in verse 3 of Chapter 10.
“Behold I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts.”
Now this scripture has been variously loved, ignored, and misunderstood by generations of Latter-day Saints. It tends to get missed by superficial readers – especially when the important verses that follow are underlined in red. But Moroni, who wrote for our time, seems to be zeroing in on this particular one of our modern mistakes – I mean our superficial reading (and scanning).
The first request is that we remember something. This is certainly not a skill that our technological age encourages. If anything, the internet tells us that we need no longer worry about remembering. Why should we? Everything we need to know is just a few clicks away.
And yet the great literature of the world has always required of us a bit of reflection. Russell Kirk writes that, “The mass of miscellaneous information thrust upon us already is overwhelming and dismaying. What we need is not more information; what we require, as a public, is the ability to discriminate and integrate that mass of information, and to reflect upon it”.
Then as the content of our remembering is processed (explains Moroni) we are to ponder upon its meaning in our hearts. It would seem that Moroni is asking us to be very intimate readers. This apparently simple verse is asking us to do something like the following: read a sacred text, familiarize ourselves with sacred history enough to be able to reflect upon it, then (once a rational understanding has been achieved) consider the deeper significance of what it means to us. Awareness is expected to go from the written word into our short term memory, then to our long-term memory, then to our hearts, and finally to change our lives. We are to process a thought through the brain, through the heart, and then through the will. This is not a process measured in megabytes and seconds. This is clearly a process of engaging a text and letting it inform and to change our lives.
What happens if we sunder this sequence to the soul? What happens if we re-train our minds to become efficient scanners without retaining our human-paced ability to reflect? I think we risk being deceived. We run the risk of finding ourselves spiritually, historically and humanely limited.
But in truth, we don’t know what our current literary neglect will do to us. One possibility is that we will only be less informed. Another possibility is that we will physically become less human. Consider the recent findings (reported by Nicholas Carr) of researchers studying the brains of London taxi drivers.
It turns out that those drivers with the most experience – those having driven the streets of London for decades – had enlarged areas of the brain. Their posterior hippocampus tended to be larger than normal. This change had developed because of an exaggerated need to navigate the intricate maze of streets in a large and complex metropolitan area. The authors of the study believe that this acquired ability also came with trade-offs. The size of the brain, it is believed, is only able to grow so much within a rigid adult skull. If one area gets bigger does this mean that an adjacent area must get smaller?
Or in other words, if we become master scanners, do we lose an existing (yet underutilized) ability like deeper reflection – something like gaining fat while losing muscle? Maybe we do, but we don’t know. I have more optimism in our God-given brains than to become alarmed over this anatomical issue. What does alarm me a great deal, however, is our ongoing cultural neglect of serious literature and the ability to seriously engage a text.
This ability is being neglected, for sure. Just take a few minutes and scan the literature on public education these days. Most of the discussion is over budgets, test scores, new legislation, technology, etc. Where is the serious thought about texts? Now, in order to save money, we even hear of proposals to eliminate many existing books from the classroom – relying on web-based alternatives instead.
We have every reason to be concerned about this. Take for instance Betsy Sparrow’s (et al.) recent findings in Science that the internet affects memory. In a series of experiments, students were tested on their ability to recall information under various situations. The researchers found that the ability to remember was significantly less when participants expected that they could find the information later online. What students where remembering, was how to access the information rather than on the information itself.
I think Moroni just might be a little concerned about this. Maybe it isn’t all that important whether or not we memorize the names of the Beatles, of every recipe we use, or every street name between hear and the airport. Let’s use our gadgets for such expedients. But let’s remember that it does matter if we’ve committed sacred texts to memory. It also matters whether or not we remember the main arguments of a political philosopher or of an observant historian. And how do we expect to make our lives better if we can’t even remember what an inspired leader taught us just a few months ago?
There were good reasons that our ancestors memorized texts. We are a bit surprised when we learn, for example, that a couple of hundred years ago, public speeches (often lasting many hours) were memorized by talented listeners and written down afterwards. We are sobered by the dedication of Muslims that memorize the Koran. And now that I’m not so far from being a senior citizen, I’m amazed that many of the long texts I memorized as a youth are still with me and inform my thinking to this day.
Memory and reflection go hand-in-hand. And the kinds of memories that really matter are the ones that we gather from important texts. If we get wired by engaging the digital world, then we need to know when to step away from it. We need time to stop and think. Moroni was keenly aware of this. In fact, who knows, he may have been looking right at us and our distracted selves shaking his head. It’s worth reflecting on just such a possibility.
References
Christine Rosen’s article In the Beginning Was the Word appeared in the Autumn, 2009 issue of the Wilson Quarterly (Volume 33(4):48-53). My copy of Daniel Boorstin’s book The Image, A Guide to Psuedo-Events in America was published by Vintage in 1987. Russell Kirk’s statement comes from Humane Learning in the Age of the Computer, found (as Chapter IX) in Redeeming the Time, published by ISI Books in 1999 (second printing). For the account of the London taxi drivers and the issue of brain changes caused by the internet, see The Shallows, what the internet is doing to our brains by Nicholas Carr (published by W.W. Norton & Company, 2010). For Betsy Sparrow’s (et al.) article see: Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at our Fingertips, Science, 333, pp. 776-778 (2011).
Sunday, February 12, 2012
The Faith of Columbus
On September 13, 1501, Christopher Columbus wrote a letter to Father Gaspar Gorricio who resided at the Monastery of Santa Maria de Las Cuevas near Seville. With this letter, Columbus also provided a copy of a manuscript that he had prepared compiling several scriptures (over 100 pages of them) and sayings from early church fathers. This manuscript has become known as Columbus’s Book of Prophecies.
What stands out more than anything else in this volume is Columbus’s profound sense of personal destiny. His stated motivation for writing it was to convince the Spanish crown to free Mount Zion and Jerusalem. And so he argues that the hundreds of scriptural references to other people, to non-Israelite nations, to islands of the seas, etc. were all predictions of the rulers’ noble work.
Of course Columbus also saw himself in these prophecies. In fact it is hard to imagine that he saw much more than himself in them, even if he apparently made his argument for the king and queen’s benefit alone. Columbus’s biographers have been quite clear through the years that the Genoese explorer had an ego to match his determination. The Book of Prophecies might be understood as just another example of this inflated self-regard.
But I think that this would be a mistake. The book, if it implies that ancient holy men actually saw Columbus or knew of him, also sheds a good deal of light on the sincerity of the explorer’s faith. In fact, it sheds an interesting and important light on his understanding of what the word faith actually means. For Columbus, it was faith that enabled him to fulfill the many scriptural prophecies that he believed were referring to himself.
Columbus writes: “Everyone who heard about my enterprise rejected it with laughter and ridicule… Only Your Highness had faith and perseverance. Who could doubt that this flash of understanding was the work of the Holy Spirit, as well my own? The Holy Spirit illuminated his holy and sacred Scripture, encouraging me in a very strong and clear voice from the forty-four books of the Old Testament, the four evangelists, and twenty-three epistles from the blessed apostles, urging me to proceed. Continually, without ceasing a moment, they insisted that I go on.”
Columbus then proceeds to admit that he is not a highly educated man (although it is clear that he was no ignorant man either) and that he has sinned greatly in his life. Yet every time that he made mistakes, he was forgiven of the Lord. Then he proceeds.
“This is what I want to record here in order to remind Your Highness and so that you can take pleasure from the things that I am going to tell you about Jerusalem on the basis of the same authority. If you have faith in this enterprise, you will certainly have the victory… Remember, Your Highnesses, that with very little money you undertook the reconquest [sic] of the kingdom of Granada. The working out of all things has been left by Our Lord to individual free will, although he advises many.”
It is hard for modern historians to speak convincingly of such religious conviction. It is much easier for them to understand Columbus’s will for power, recognition and wealth. And yet, even allowing for a great deal of hyperbole in the Book of Prophecies, one cannot discount the priority of religious faith in the explorer’s life. Columbus had a great deal of self-esteem. He also had a great deal of faith in sacred texts. Understanding the combination of both in his mind (that these texts had predicted his role in sacred history) gives a much better insight into his personality than do so many secular arguments that fill our current curricula.
What makes this insight so compelling is that it stands as one of the great examples in the history of the world of the power of a certain kind of faith. For Columbus, this faith involved an understanding of the God of the Bible. It also involved his belief that his own life was known to God and was, in fact, accepted by Him to fulfill His divine pre-ordained plan. Furthermore, this faith was based on a free will that effects the “working out of things”.
This is almost a textbook example of the kind of faith described in the Lectures on Faith. There is the recognition of God and an understanding of His attributes. There is the recognition that one’s life is being lived in accordance to divine will. There is also the under-lying base of faith as the principle of action.
For Latter-day Saints who hold the Lectures on Faith in such high regard (in fact most of the book was written by Joseph Smith with input from Sidney Rigdon) this is evidence that Columbus was a man of great faith. Of course this is confirmed in The Book of Mormon where a clear reference to Columbus indicates that the “Spirit of God” rested upon him and led him to the Americas.
This is also a remarkable confirmation of Joseph Smith’s teaching about faith. Joseph, almost certainly, had no access to the Book of Prophecies and yet there could be no better fit of his understanding of faith than Columbus’s autobiographical account. This is all the more remarkable because The Book of Mormon leaves no room to doubt that the Genoese sailor was a man of divine destiny. This is a powerful testimony of both Joseph Smith and Christopher Columbus. It is also a benchmark for understanding that very misunderstood principle of faith.
This kind of faith is not a wishy-washy belief system. Neither is it a misinformed or gullible zeal. One might not believe in Columbus’s God, but it’s hard not to believe that Columbus believed in himself. The problem for nonbelievers is the recognition that Columbus would not have accomplished what he did without his particular kind of faith. And one of the profound messages of this kind of faith is that it is immensely powerful and that it comes with a big dose of self-knowledge.
In a world plagued with artificial causes and self-doubt, Columbus has much to teach us. He almost compels us to ask the self-penetrating question of whether personal understanding is possible without faith. In a post-Darwin world there aren’t many other choices on which we might anchor ourselves. Either we arrive at a tenuous self-fulfillment through competitive survival, or we develop our own gifts in the service of God. This simple dichotomy is perhaps the main reason that Columbus is so out of fashion these days.
References
The University of California Press (Berkeley) has recently published a series of texts on Columbus. Volume III (1997), The Book of Prophecies Edited by Christopher Columbus (edited by Roberto Rusconi and translated by Blair Sullivan) is my source. Carol Delaney’s book Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem was published last year (2011) by Free Press. My copy of Lectures on Faith was published by Bookcraft. The reference to Columbus in The Book of Mormon is in 1 Nephi 13:12.
What stands out more than anything else in this volume is Columbus’s profound sense of personal destiny. His stated motivation for writing it was to convince the Spanish crown to free Mount Zion and Jerusalem. And so he argues that the hundreds of scriptural references to other people, to non-Israelite nations, to islands of the seas, etc. were all predictions of the rulers’ noble work.
Of course Columbus also saw himself in these prophecies. In fact it is hard to imagine that he saw much more than himself in them, even if he apparently made his argument for the king and queen’s benefit alone. Columbus’s biographers have been quite clear through the years that the Genoese explorer had an ego to match his determination. The Book of Prophecies might be understood as just another example of this inflated self-regard.
But I think that this would be a mistake. The book, if it implies that ancient holy men actually saw Columbus or knew of him, also sheds a good deal of light on the sincerity of the explorer’s faith. In fact, it sheds an interesting and important light on his understanding of what the word faith actually means. For Columbus, it was faith that enabled him to fulfill the many scriptural prophecies that he believed were referring to himself.
Columbus writes: “Everyone who heard about my enterprise rejected it with laughter and ridicule… Only Your Highness had faith and perseverance. Who could doubt that this flash of understanding was the work of the Holy Spirit, as well my own? The Holy Spirit illuminated his holy and sacred Scripture, encouraging me in a very strong and clear voice from the forty-four books of the Old Testament, the four evangelists, and twenty-three epistles from the blessed apostles, urging me to proceed. Continually, without ceasing a moment, they insisted that I go on.”
Columbus then proceeds to admit that he is not a highly educated man (although it is clear that he was no ignorant man either) and that he has sinned greatly in his life. Yet every time that he made mistakes, he was forgiven of the Lord. Then he proceeds.
“This is what I want to record here in order to remind Your Highness and so that you can take pleasure from the things that I am going to tell you about Jerusalem on the basis of the same authority. If you have faith in this enterprise, you will certainly have the victory… Remember, Your Highnesses, that with very little money you undertook the reconquest [sic] of the kingdom of Granada. The working out of all things has been left by Our Lord to individual free will, although he advises many.”
It is hard for modern historians to speak convincingly of such religious conviction. It is much easier for them to understand Columbus’s will for power, recognition and wealth. And yet, even allowing for a great deal of hyperbole in the Book of Prophecies, one cannot discount the priority of religious faith in the explorer’s life. Columbus had a great deal of self-esteem. He also had a great deal of faith in sacred texts. Understanding the combination of both in his mind (that these texts had predicted his role in sacred history) gives a much better insight into his personality than do so many secular arguments that fill our current curricula.
What makes this insight so compelling is that it stands as one of the great examples in the history of the world of the power of a certain kind of faith. For Columbus, this faith involved an understanding of the God of the Bible. It also involved his belief that his own life was known to God and was, in fact, accepted by Him to fulfill His divine pre-ordained plan. Furthermore, this faith was based on a free will that effects the “working out of things”.
This is almost a textbook example of the kind of faith described in the Lectures on Faith. There is the recognition of God and an understanding of His attributes. There is the recognition that one’s life is being lived in accordance to divine will. There is also the under-lying base of faith as the principle of action.
For Latter-day Saints who hold the Lectures on Faith in such high regard (in fact most of the book was written by Joseph Smith with input from Sidney Rigdon) this is evidence that Columbus was a man of great faith. Of course this is confirmed in The Book of Mormon where a clear reference to Columbus indicates that the “Spirit of God” rested upon him and led him to the Americas.
This is also a remarkable confirmation of Joseph Smith’s teaching about faith. Joseph, almost certainly, had no access to the Book of Prophecies and yet there could be no better fit of his understanding of faith than Columbus’s autobiographical account. This is all the more remarkable because The Book of Mormon leaves no room to doubt that the Genoese sailor was a man of divine destiny. This is a powerful testimony of both Joseph Smith and Christopher Columbus. It is also a benchmark for understanding that very misunderstood principle of faith.
This kind of faith is not a wishy-washy belief system. Neither is it a misinformed or gullible zeal. One might not believe in Columbus’s God, but it’s hard not to believe that Columbus believed in himself. The problem for nonbelievers is the recognition that Columbus would not have accomplished what he did without his particular kind of faith. And one of the profound messages of this kind of faith is that it is immensely powerful and that it comes with a big dose of self-knowledge.
In a world plagued with artificial causes and self-doubt, Columbus has much to teach us. He almost compels us to ask the self-penetrating question of whether personal understanding is possible without faith. In a post-Darwin world there aren’t many other choices on which we might anchor ourselves. Either we arrive at a tenuous self-fulfillment through competitive survival, or we develop our own gifts in the service of God. This simple dichotomy is perhaps the main reason that Columbus is so out of fashion these days.
References
The University of California Press (Berkeley) has recently published a series of texts on Columbus. Volume III (1997), The Book of Prophecies Edited by Christopher Columbus (edited by Roberto Rusconi and translated by Blair Sullivan) is my source. Carol Delaney’s book Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem was published last year (2011) by Free Press. My copy of Lectures on Faith was published by Bookcraft. The reference to Columbus in The Book of Mormon is in 1 Nephi 13:12.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Not All Composts Are the Same
Not all composts are the same. I know this sounds obvious, but I recently did a little experiment anyway just to see for myself. Last summer, I found myself back in the Sierra Nevada of California camping at an elevation of maybe 7,000 feet. We were near an impressive grove of old red firs. By the parking area I noticed that a pile of soil had fallen from the forest above an exposed bank of earth. It was dark and rich, very different than the pale dirt of the exposed bank. When I looked closer at the forest I realized that the soil was a thick matting of decomposing fir needles. It was then that I decided to conduct my little experiment.
I gathered a bag of the soil and took it home. Then I went looking for another large grove of trees with a thick and naturally composted soil. I found it near the San Joaquin River north of Fresno under some very large California sycamores. Finally, I gathered some of my own backyard compost made of yard leaves and kitchen scraps – pretty much a mix of everything urbanely biodegradable.
I then cleared a small area in the garden at the end of the summer and spread the three kinds of composts next to each other. Then I purchased a couple of varieties of lettuce and placed each one in the three composts. By Thanksgiving time, they were big enough to eat and I was ready to see if my little experiment would have anything meaningful to show for itself. I wanted to see if different kinds of soil would grow plants that tasted noticeably different.
In a way this seems fairly obvious, at least to serious gardeners. We, who have grown our own food for any amount of time, know quite well that a home-grown vegetable almost always tastes better than the same vegetable purchased from a supermarket. But being the experimentalist that I am, I wanted to see for myself in a direct comparison.
And I knew I would have a good chance to run a blind experiment on Thanksgiving. Erik and Tabitha were coming for the holiday and so were Alton and Bonnie (Kathy’s parents). They all agreed to participate in my little study. First, I cut enough of the lettuce for each of us to taste samples from each kind of compost. Then I arranged them so that only I would know which kind was which.
Almost immediately my participants could tell a difference in taste. Then Tabitha and Erik noticed a slight difference in smell too. Bonnie and Alton both came to the same conclusion. The lettuce grown in red fir and sycamore soils had a stronger bitter taste than the lettuce grown in the yard compost.
We decided that this might be caused by the more acid nature of the fir and sycamore soils. That’s my running hypothesis for the time being. In any event, the experiment was worthwhile. The differences were quite apparent. And it also made me think about soils in a broader context.
We truly are what we eat, and the things that we eat are made of the very substances of where they grow. Native animals and plants are not the only things that are tied to specific places. People are too. We don’t normally stop to consider what this means though. A typical day of a typical American involves eating food from all around the world – from soils that have no influence of any kind in purchasing decisions. We eat the food from cheap and expensive restaurants (and pseudo-restaurants) without an agronomic care in the world. I think this is bit naïve.
And I admit that I am mostly naïve myself on such issues. We should do better. Maybe we like the idea of owning an international body; fed, that is, from around the world. The only trouble with this thinking is that we really don’t know what it means. Does it mean that we are corporally (even viscerally) generic? I hope not. I expect that it partly means that we live in cages. The only internationally nourished animals that I know of are either kept in zoos or are otherwise domesticated and fed by humans. Wild animals all find their food locally.
But maybe I’m taking my little lettuce experiment too far. I’m not sure. Certainly “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in [my] philosophy”. But then again, Hamlet was talking about heaven and earth. And so am I.
I gathered a bag of the soil and took it home. Then I went looking for another large grove of trees with a thick and naturally composted soil. I found it near the San Joaquin River north of Fresno under some very large California sycamores. Finally, I gathered some of my own backyard compost made of yard leaves and kitchen scraps – pretty much a mix of everything urbanely biodegradable.
I then cleared a small area in the garden at the end of the summer and spread the three kinds of composts next to each other. Then I purchased a couple of varieties of lettuce and placed each one in the three composts. By Thanksgiving time, they were big enough to eat and I was ready to see if my little experiment would have anything meaningful to show for itself. I wanted to see if different kinds of soil would grow plants that tasted noticeably different.
In a way this seems fairly obvious, at least to serious gardeners. We, who have grown our own food for any amount of time, know quite well that a home-grown vegetable almost always tastes better than the same vegetable purchased from a supermarket. But being the experimentalist that I am, I wanted to see for myself in a direct comparison.
And I knew I would have a good chance to run a blind experiment on Thanksgiving. Erik and Tabitha were coming for the holiday and so were Alton and Bonnie (Kathy’s parents). They all agreed to participate in my little study. First, I cut enough of the lettuce for each of us to taste samples from each kind of compost. Then I arranged them so that only I would know which kind was which.
Almost immediately my participants could tell a difference in taste. Then Tabitha and Erik noticed a slight difference in smell too. Bonnie and Alton both came to the same conclusion. The lettuce grown in red fir and sycamore soils had a stronger bitter taste than the lettuce grown in the yard compost.
We decided that this might be caused by the more acid nature of the fir and sycamore soils. That’s my running hypothesis for the time being. In any event, the experiment was worthwhile. The differences were quite apparent. And it also made me think about soils in a broader context.
We truly are what we eat, and the things that we eat are made of the very substances of where they grow. Native animals and plants are not the only things that are tied to specific places. People are too. We don’t normally stop to consider what this means though. A typical day of a typical American involves eating food from all around the world – from soils that have no influence of any kind in purchasing decisions. We eat the food from cheap and expensive restaurants (and pseudo-restaurants) without an agronomic care in the world. I think this is bit naïve.
And I admit that I am mostly naïve myself on such issues. We should do better. Maybe we like the idea of owning an international body; fed, that is, from around the world. The only trouble with this thinking is that we really don’t know what it means. Does it mean that we are corporally (even viscerally) generic? I hope not. I expect that it partly means that we live in cages. The only internationally nourished animals that I know of are either kept in zoos or are otherwise domesticated and fed by humans. Wild animals all find their food locally.
But maybe I’m taking my little lettuce experiment too far. I’m not sure. Certainly “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in [my] philosophy”. But then again, Hamlet was talking about heaven and earth. And so am I.
Monday, January 9, 2012
A Raven's Wire Nest
There used to be a bird nest in the basement of the Bean Museum. It wasn’t built around a light fixture or above an exposed truss, nor was it made of twigs and lined with feathers. It was positioned artistically behind display glass in the hall outside of the auditorium, and it was made of carefully interwoven lengths of barbed wire. Mounted guardedly atop the whole was an erstwhile relative (now stuffed) of the former engineer: a raven.
You have to love a bird that can make a house from a dilapidated fence. There’s a bit of spite in the act, and maybe a sense of raw survival too. In a spare land, one learns to be resourceful – whether that one be a bird or a human being. But how could such a thing be done? At some point the raven had to drag, bend and otherwise maneuver a long heavy wire into an available tree. Presumably it had to fly to the chosen branches with the metal in its beak.
Ornithologists have been telling us for years that corvids are smarter than we think. Maybe all it takes is for one of them to be large enough and strong enough (like a raven) so that hefting a piece of decomposing fence into a home becomes inevitable. What would an elephant-sized magpie be capable of doing?
But there is also a timeless propriety in the subordination of a modern technology to a wild creature. It makes one pause to consider the fate of our own constructs. To what use might a feral species make of a computer, for example.
The power chord is, no doubt, easier to nidify than barbed wire. And maybe the circuits could warm frail nestlings when the sun is low in the horizon. A more likely use would be as a parasol for kangaroo rats. Eventually though, the miraculous innovations of decades to come, just like those of decades past, will be piled into heaps and left for the penetrating roots of organisms that are better adapted to live in raven-inhabiting austerity.
Unless, of course, we decide to adapt to a landscape that can keep us. Or, to put it more accurately: unless we learn to live sustainably where we are. Let our technologies come and go. Some people will get rich from them and others won’t. But most of the technologies themselves will not endure. Unless we are wise enough to treat them much like a disposable fence, our dependence on them may become too great. Human beings, just like ravens, can’t ultimately make a life from a rusted wire.
What we need is a soil that will sustain us for a thousand years. You may wonder what is so special about a thousand years. A lot of things are actually. You see, in a thousand years the only people left on Planet Earth will be those that are living on sustainable soil. This might be a handful of hunter-gatherers who wander in search of whatever the post-apocalyptic earth has to offer. Or it might be a world filled with our descendants living on a land that feeds them, because they have learned how to feed it.
Our traditions include a belief in a future Millennium when we will live in peace and harmony. Some of us have interpreted this to mean that a magical transformation will suddenly eliminate all evil and suffering from the world. If we have destroyed the land because of greed or of ignorance or even war, surely a divine providence will make it all better, or so we seem to assume.
I disagree. My millennial expectations are more in line with those of Brigham Young who insisted that “When we have streets paved with gold, we will place it there ourselves”.
Much of our confusion revolves around a misunderstood word in the Creation account found in the first chapter of Genesis (verse 28). “And God blessed them [referring to Adam and Eve] and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” The same command was repeated to Noah after the Flood (see Genesis 9:1).
What are we to make of this word replenish? In many exegeses it is understood to mean reproduce. In fact all three injunctions are understood this way: be fruitful, multiply, and replenish. In this view mankind is commanded to have a lot of descendants and this is all the scripture means. I’m not convinced that this is correct. Having a family is certainly a big part of the verse, but I doubt that it is all that is meant.
In my Oxford English Dictionary (Compact Edition) replenish has ten definitions. Only one of the ten means to occupy with people (Definition 6). The others are transitive verbs referring to filling up or stocking with something. Definition 7 specifically refers to filling with food. Definition 10 means increase.
The overall sense of replenishing is to provide an abundance of something. In reference to a viable place like the earth, it carries the sense of fertility and health. As it refers to people it refers to that which sustains people: the soil, the water, the air. In reference to the earth the command requires that mankind make it abundant with life. It is a command to assume stewardship of the planet.
And, in fact, this is what the raven is doing in its own way on top of its barbed-wire nest. It is taking a lifeless length of wire and using it to give life. The raven, it seems, is filling the measure of its creation. What about us? Are we doing the same?
Sadly, I think, the answer is no. The posterity of Adam and Eve are expected to do more than just reproduce. If that is all we do, and then over-extract the life-giving resources of our world, we then become no more than the animal creation – intent only on increasing our Darwinian fitness. Actually we are worse than this. If we only use our super-natural intelligence for Darwinian ends, we will (and do) cause much harm. And, ironically, this is a mindset that will destroy the world.
Only humans, in harmony with the gifts of Creation, can make a fallen world a garden. The desert can blossom as the rose, but it can only do so over time if soil is built up and water is used wisely. These are gifts that we give back to the earth, not as beasts, but as divinely inspired and responsible stewards. Gardening is an act of the Children of God. On the other hand, ruthless (“limitless”) extraction is a Faustian game that never ends well for mortals.
So what is the human equivalent of the opportunistic raven? How do we replenish the earth amidst the piles of multi-generational refuse? I think that each one of us is left to answer this question ourselves. But while you’re thinking about it, I’m going to go out back, find my man-made pitchfork, and turn over my compost pile.
Notes
Thanks to the M.L. Bean Staff at BYU for the raven picture. I am also indebted to Wendell Berry’s insightful piece in Harper’s Magazine: Faustian Economics: Hell hath no Limits (May, 2008). Brigham Young’s quote is from Discourses of Brigham Young by John a Widtsoe (page 29).
You have to love a bird that can make a house from a dilapidated fence. There’s a bit of spite in the act, and maybe a sense of raw survival too. In a spare land, one learns to be resourceful – whether that one be a bird or a human being. But how could such a thing be done? At some point the raven had to drag, bend and otherwise maneuver a long heavy wire into an available tree. Presumably it had to fly to the chosen branches with the metal in its beak.
Ornithologists have been telling us for years that corvids are smarter than we think. Maybe all it takes is for one of them to be large enough and strong enough (like a raven) so that hefting a piece of decomposing fence into a home becomes inevitable. What would an elephant-sized magpie be capable of doing?
But there is also a timeless propriety in the subordination of a modern technology to a wild creature. It makes one pause to consider the fate of our own constructs. To what use might a feral species make of a computer, for example.
The power chord is, no doubt, easier to nidify than barbed wire. And maybe the circuits could warm frail nestlings when the sun is low in the horizon. A more likely use would be as a parasol for kangaroo rats. Eventually though, the miraculous innovations of decades to come, just like those of decades past, will be piled into heaps and left for the penetrating roots of organisms that are better adapted to live in raven-inhabiting austerity.
Unless, of course, we decide to adapt to a landscape that can keep us. Or, to put it more accurately: unless we learn to live sustainably where we are. Let our technologies come and go. Some people will get rich from them and others won’t. But most of the technologies themselves will not endure. Unless we are wise enough to treat them much like a disposable fence, our dependence on them may become too great. Human beings, just like ravens, can’t ultimately make a life from a rusted wire.
What we need is a soil that will sustain us for a thousand years. You may wonder what is so special about a thousand years. A lot of things are actually. You see, in a thousand years the only people left on Planet Earth will be those that are living on sustainable soil. This might be a handful of hunter-gatherers who wander in search of whatever the post-apocalyptic earth has to offer. Or it might be a world filled with our descendants living on a land that feeds them, because they have learned how to feed it.
Our traditions include a belief in a future Millennium when we will live in peace and harmony. Some of us have interpreted this to mean that a magical transformation will suddenly eliminate all evil and suffering from the world. If we have destroyed the land because of greed or of ignorance or even war, surely a divine providence will make it all better, or so we seem to assume.
I disagree. My millennial expectations are more in line with those of Brigham Young who insisted that “When we have streets paved with gold, we will place it there ourselves”.
Much of our confusion revolves around a misunderstood word in the Creation account found in the first chapter of Genesis (verse 28). “And God blessed them [referring to Adam and Eve] and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” The same command was repeated to Noah after the Flood (see Genesis 9:1).
What are we to make of this word replenish? In many exegeses it is understood to mean reproduce. In fact all three injunctions are understood this way: be fruitful, multiply, and replenish. In this view mankind is commanded to have a lot of descendants and this is all the scripture means. I’m not convinced that this is correct. Having a family is certainly a big part of the verse, but I doubt that it is all that is meant.
In my Oxford English Dictionary (Compact Edition) replenish has ten definitions. Only one of the ten means to occupy with people (Definition 6). The others are transitive verbs referring to filling up or stocking with something. Definition 7 specifically refers to filling with food. Definition 10 means increase.
The overall sense of replenishing is to provide an abundance of something. In reference to a viable place like the earth, it carries the sense of fertility and health. As it refers to people it refers to that which sustains people: the soil, the water, the air. In reference to the earth the command requires that mankind make it abundant with life. It is a command to assume stewardship of the planet.
And, in fact, this is what the raven is doing in its own way on top of its barbed-wire nest. It is taking a lifeless length of wire and using it to give life. The raven, it seems, is filling the measure of its creation. What about us? Are we doing the same?
Sadly, I think, the answer is no. The posterity of Adam and Eve are expected to do more than just reproduce. If that is all we do, and then over-extract the life-giving resources of our world, we then become no more than the animal creation – intent only on increasing our Darwinian fitness. Actually we are worse than this. If we only use our super-natural intelligence for Darwinian ends, we will (and do) cause much harm. And, ironically, this is a mindset that will destroy the world.
Only humans, in harmony with the gifts of Creation, can make a fallen world a garden. The desert can blossom as the rose, but it can only do so over time if soil is built up and water is used wisely. These are gifts that we give back to the earth, not as beasts, but as divinely inspired and responsible stewards. Gardening is an act of the Children of God. On the other hand, ruthless (“limitless”) extraction is a Faustian game that never ends well for mortals.
So what is the human equivalent of the opportunistic raven? How do we replenish the earth amidst the piles of multi-generational refuse? I think that each one of us is left to answer this question ourselves. But while you’re thinking about it, I’m going to go out back, find my man-made pitchfork, and turn over my compost pile.
Notes
Thanks to the M.L. Bean Staff at BYU for the raven picture. I am also indebted to Wendell Berry’s insightful piece in Harper’s Magazine: Faustian Economics: Hell hath no Limits (May, 2008). Brigham Young’s quote is from Discourses of Brigham Young by John a Widtsoe (page 29).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
