Voyage of Discovery: Art and the Arctic

By: | March 4, 2014

macro/micro

Right now at the headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, here in Washington, D.C, is an art show about climate change in the Arctic. Three local artists worked together on the show, called Voyage of Discovery.

I know, art about climate change in the Arctic. It sounds depressing at best and preachy at worst. But it’s not.

Artist Michele Banks does lovely work with the strange blues of Arctic ice. In the windows of the gallery hang “Micro/Macro,” a series of ink-on-mylar paintings about the transition between ice and water (one is above). Elsewhere, in a series of cute little round watercolors set in petri dishes, her patterns suggest algae and other critters that live in the Arctic sea.

Climate change has human effects, too, of course. In a piece called “In the Balance,” a boat made of handmade paper over a steel frame, based on a native Alaskan fishing boat, is tossed by giant waves; this was inspired, says artist Jessica Beels, by hearing that people in Alaska have found they can’t predict the behavior of the weather and the water as well as they used to. Global climate change has meant local weather changes and more dangerous encounters with the sea for people who make their living from it. Continue reading →

The Last Word(s)

By: | March 1, 2014

February 24 – 28, 2014

SCENERYCameron, trains, and writing: “I watched until it grew so dark that the only things that seemed to exist were the fire and the man’s illuminated hands.”

Christie, death, and grief:  “Such platitudes offered me no comfort. The truth is, Pia died far too young, and I wish she hadn’t.”

 Jessa, no-till, and drainage:  “Mother nature knows how to balance and settle her own creations, but it seems she’s not particularly interested in other people’s brainchildren.”

Cassandra, cable companies, and hidden expense:  “Here’s what I want to know: Why are we letting industries set their own energy efficiency standards?”

Guest Ivan Amato, blackboards, and thinking: “The scientists I have spoken to at Kavli say their their chalkboard sessions are ways to clarify blurry thoughts, to work out bugs in half-baked theories in collaborative on-the-fly edits replete with chalk-frosted fingers and palms, and to see, perhaps for the first time, the inklings of a great thought—perhaps one they will be most proud of in their careers—staring back at them.”

 

Guest Post: Thought’s First Draft

By: | February 28, 2014

chalkboardYou cannot walk more than a dozen paces at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, a cloister of sorts for the more theoretically- and mathematically-inclined of the science community, without happening onto a chalkboard.

Secured on at least one wall of each small office on the building’s two floors is a spacious chalkboard. Chalkboards run across the entire length of the building’s auditorium. At the front of the building’s main lecture hall is a two-tier set of chalkboards, with a sliding mechanism for interchanging the low slabs for the high. Continue reading →

Cable Companies’ Hidden Scam

By: | February 27, 2014

cable boxYour cable company is screwing you. You already knew that, of course. You’ve seen your cable bill. But I want to tell you about a less obvious way that they’re sucking your bank account dry. They’re doing it through the cable box.

I don’t have cable, but I used to. And what I miss most about the service is the box. That box was magic: I could record my favorite shows. I could pause a show midstream and refill my wine glass. I could fast forward through Kia commercials with their creepy gangs of hip hamsters. I could (gasp!) even rewind. It was television viewing at its goddamned finest. I watched what I wanted when I wanted.

Now I get my TV shows via an antenna. And once a moment has passed, it’s gone. There’s no going back. There’s no avoiding the commercials. There’s no watching what I want when I want.

But I recently learned that the box’s magic comes at a price. Those slim little devices are energy guzzlers. Fancy boxes like the one I had, those that deliver HD and allow you to record, consume between 20 and 45 watts, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. The Council estimates that the average household (which has one HD-DVR device and one HD box) uses 446 kilowatt hours of energy each year to power their boxes.  That’s more than an Energy Star refrigerator requires. Why?! My cable box isn’t freezing chicken or chilling beer. What the hell! Continue reading →

Too good to be true: The No-Till Solution

By: | February 26, 2014

 

plowed landIn the late 1960s, when North America was first wising up to pollution, a group of progressive farmers resolved to do their part. Phosphate levels in nearby lakes were promoting blue-green algal blooms, excessively nourishing the cyanobacteria. The blooms consumed oxygen in the lakes, and massive fish kills followed.

While it was easy to blame untreated sewage that spewed into most water bodies in populated areas at the time, there was a clear contribution from fertilizers high in phosphorus. When storms pelted the shoreline farmland, particulate phosphorus would wash down unguarded inclines along with much of the freshly-tilled soil. Erosion wasn’t just bad for the environment, it was costly and bad for crop health.

Along came no-till farming.

Instead of disturbing and opening the earth all over a field until it is vulnerable to erosion, no-till farming only opens ground for the purposes of planting. To make up for the lower absorption capacity of intact ground, farmers line up crop residue to create water channels.

Continue reading →

Death Barged In

By: | February 25, 2014

Pia copy

Pia’s birthday was last week. I didn’t call her or send a card or bake a cake. Such efforts would have fallen on deaf ears, because she died six years ago in January.

Pia was the older sister I’d never had, and she’d welcomed me into her life with apricots and a warm pot of tea. A magnet on her refrigerator door read “sister-in-laws by chance, friends by choice” and I always thought that it referred to us. We were prone to wonky discussions about drinking water and the fate of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. She was finishing a PhD in environmental engineering when cancer intruded on her best-laid plans.

On Christmas, 2007, I flew to California to care for her as she lay dying of cancer. She needed so much and the things I could do felt so small—help her out of bed, place slippers on her swollen feet, prepare fresh dressings for her wound and listen when she felt like talking. Inside, she was still the same person I’d always known, but her body was fading into a ghost of her former self. Nothing could prepare me for the devastation of watching someone I love slowly, painfully, disappear. Months of therapy helped me accept that I did the best I could, but I will never feel that I did enough. Continue reading →

Train of Thought

By: | February 24, 2014

If you’re interested in writingSCENERY, and you’ve been on the internet in the last few days, you may have seen that Amtrak granted a pilot writers’ residency to a New York writer, who took the Lakeshore Limited to Chicago and back, working away in her 3’6” by 6’8” sleeper cabin. And since then, other writers have been weighing in, many with hopes of sign up for the next installment.

What follows is not an application, but an exploration: I’ve only ever been in coach, and if I got a free sleeper berth, I’d want to take my kids. (Or just sleep, uninterrupted.) But I’m fascinated by what makes trains so great for writing. Nearly everywhere I’ve lived has been on an Amtrak line, and every time I’ve traveled by train, I’ve gotten some good work done, whether on the page or just in my mind. Continue reading →