We walk on waves; they fly below

By: | November 21, 2018

It has been said that penguins appear to be wearing tuxedos—crisp and elegant in their blacks and whites. This is not so of Humboldt penguins. If Humboldt penguins are wearing tuxedos, then they have been wearing them to jump trains for a couple of weeks, sleeping atop coal slag or down in the dingy corners of yawning boxcars. The birds are gray and ragged around the edges, their white chests flecked as if with cinder burns. And their eyes look like the last edge of a hangover receding—bloodshot, merry, curious. They look like they have seen some things.

These are the eyes that peer up at me through the wire-grate door of an upended cat carrier, on the deck of a boat, 35 miles offshore of Chile in the southeast Pacific Ocean. Continue reading →

Mary Poppins Is An Anarchist In Strict-Nanny Disguise

By: | November 20, 2018

“If this was a democracy, you would still lose,” is something my husband has told our 3-year-old after she objects to our decisions. I can feel the frustration build in her as though it were tightening my own chest. But in the world of Mary Poppins, she doesn’t have to take that kind of adult treatment. In that world, authority figures seem strict, but they are actually magical beings who provide weird and happy experiences, usually including animals. In that world, a kid can clean up her room by sheer magic! Cast off the shackles of yesterday, indeed.

I have watched Mary Poppins with my daughter approximately 367 times since March, and I’ve realized something. My daughter loves it for more than the animation, the silly songs, and the grace and wit of the inimitable Julie Andrews (whom none of us deserves). I think she loves it because the movie appeals, in grinning Technicolor, to a kid’s natural sense of anarchy. Mary Poppins is a gloriously leftist fantasy and I am here for it. Continue reading →

Singing Our Hearts Out

By: | November 19, 2018

This was originally posted August 5, 2013. I just spent all weekend singing with many of the same people I was singing with then, so I thought this – my first post as a person of LWON – was worth sharing again. 

That's me in the red jacket.
That’s me in the red jacket.

Recently I was rehearsing a glorious 16th-century motet with a group of 20 or so people. Haec dies quam fecit Dominus, the song begins. This is the day that the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it. It’s an Easter text and a lovely thought, whether or not you think the Lord actually made this day or whether the day made itself, thank you very much, from the rotation of the Earth. This is a day; let’s enjoy it.

The piece is by William Byrd, an English composer of Shakespeare’s time—yes, he’s wearing a ruff in his portrait—who wrote a lot of sacred music like this. The idea that different people could sing different things at the same time was fairly new in the Renaissance, and composers like Byrd went to town with it. Continue reading →

Elves in the Balance: An interview with naturalist David Mizejewski

By: | November 16, 2018

I first saw the elves on the floor of my best friend’s station wagon when I was seven. Grinning up from the back of a big book, these elves looked different from any other elves I’d seen. I’d always thought elves were a little wimpy, but instead of being fragile fey, these elves seemed fun. Even better–they had wolves!

This was my first experience with Elfquest, a fantasy comic series that is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. The series, created by Wendy and Richard Pini, chronicles the adventures of an elfin tribe that has a deep connection to their landscape and to wolves. Years ago, I read and re-read the first four graphic novel compilations so often that the pages grew soft. Recently, I came back to Elfquest after a long absence to find that not only had new installments had appeared, but that an extensive community of Elfquest lovers was frolicking (and also, delving into extensive analysis and speculation) online.

One of these Elfquest superfans is David Mizejewski, who has been the co-host of a podcast dedicated to the most recent part of the series, Elfquest: The Final Quest. He’s also a naturalist who works for the National Wildlife Federation and he appears regularly on television and radio shows to talk about wildlife.

As I listened to the podcast, I found that Mizejweski was sprinkling in details about altruism in nature and wolf social structure as he discussed the latest cliffhanger with co-host Ryan Browne. Last month I talked with him about the connection between his work as a naturalist and his interest in the series. The following is a condensed and edited version of our conversation. Continue reading →

My Daughter and the Not-Perfect Bunny

By: | November 15, 2018

You woke up screaming in the middle of the night, frantic. You held up your bunny, a floppy square of pink blanket attached to a long-eared rabbit head. “This bunny is not perfect,” you wailed.

I knew what you meant. This bunny, one of three identical bunnies, is the oldest, the most worn. His fur is a little less pink than it used to be, a little less soft. He’s clean, but the whites of his ears have grown dingy.

So, yeah, this bunny is not perfect. This bunny was loved — drug across the playground, stuffed into the trunk of your trike, abandoned briefly on the floor of the bar where your favorite musician sings the song about a peanut getting hit by a train. This bunny was loved, and with love he got used. That should make him more appealing, not less.

Continue reading →

Redux: Goodbye to the Friend I Never Met

By: | November 14, 2018

I wrote this piece a year ago at the end of an exhausting story about the end of a species. I was angry and despondent. I wish I could say that a year has changed my perspective. Scientists have spotted a surprising six individuals more during their expedition to the Upper Gulf this year. But nothing substantive has changed in the politics of the region and my hopes are dim. 
Saturday was the day I finally gave up. The last hope for the vaquita marina, the world’s smallest and most endangered cetacean, is gone. On Saturday, biologists working in the Upper Gulf of California announced that the latest animal they had captured in an effort to save the species had died in captivity.

For the first half of 2017, I was knee deep in a story I’ve been following since I got to Mexico six years ago. In summary, an animal that had found itself on the wrong side of rampant poaching practices is all but wiped out and the last option is a Hail Mary plan to round them up into captive pens and hold them until such time as humans stop sucking at ocean stewardship. (For a full review of the vaquita’s tragic tale, I really encourage you to read the story.)

But there was always a problem with this strategy – no one had ever tried to catch one before. It was possible they wouldn’t go quietly into pens.

“If captivity fails, then, well, we tried,” NOAA biologist Barbara Taylor told me in the spring. “It’s game over.”

After Saturday, I think it’s game over. The vaquita doesn’t do captivity. The first animal caught by biologists got so stressed out that it had to be released. The second died within hours. We have now officially done more harm than good in our attempts to save the vaquita. In fact, this whole effort has been one long lesson in throwing the porpoise out with the bathwater. From the beginning, it feels like we’ve tried to help the vaquita with the best of intentions and have only made things worse.

Continue reading →

Redux: An interview with David Grinspoon, author of Earth in Human Hands

By: | November 13, 2018

David Grinspoon is a comparative planetologist and an astrobiologist. He’s also a big book nerd, and his love for both fiction and nonfiction are proudly on display in his own book, Earth In Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future. The book was recently featured in an ongoing series on “Resistance Reading” selected by authors and published by Mother Jones. Author Jesmyn Ward picked it as part of her list. In her words, “this book provides a sobering exploration of how human beings have affected the climate of our planet, but also gives us reason to hope in the end. We need that now.”

I agree. Here’s an interview with Grinspoon that originally ran in March of 2017.

Continue reading →

There are Two Kinds of People: Those Who Make Their Beds and Those Who Don’t

By: | November 12, 2018

I was at the pharmacy the other day, waiting for my flu shot, when I spotted a book called Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…And Maybe the World. It was written by a retired U.S. Navy Admiral. In his tongue in cheek synopsis of the book at the Guardian, John Crace explains that the admiral learned about the importance of bed-making during Naval SEAL training camp:

Every morning, we would have to make our beds. If the task wasn’t done properly, we would be sent on a 10-mile run. Making my bed taught me the importance of getting my day off to a good start. Years later, when we finally captured Saddam Hussein in Iraq, I was intrigued to notice that he had never made his bed. It’s that kind of laziness that can lead to the downfall of any dictator.

Which is exactly the kind of thing that a bed-maker would say. As if folding sheets and positioning pillows could impose order and predictability on a chaotic, uncertain world.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who get up every morning and make their beds, and the people who don’t bother. In case it’s not obvious yet, I’m one of the latter.

It didn’t occur to me that bed-making was such a telling detail about a person until I noticed that my friend Rosemerry’s bed is always perfectly made. Continue reading →