Recently, and to much engagement-baiting fanfare, the New York Times published its list of the best books of the 21st century. As with any such list, it was riddled with omissions, both benign (whither Anthony Doerr, Madeline Miller, and Lauren Groff?) and insidious (outrageously, not a single Native American author made the cut). I was irked to note that only one nonfiction book about nature and/or the environment appeared on the list, the worthy H Is for Hawk. I love George Saunders, but did he alone pen three books that were better than anything anybody wrote this century about climate change?
Anyway, the Times’s cynical exercise got me wondering — if an outlet was to compile a list of this century’s best nature/environment books, what would be on it? On the platform formerly known as Twitter, I threw out some suggestions of my own, and solicited others from the gaggle. Some of those books are compiled in this post.
This picture creeps me out too but less so than actual living spotted lanternflies.
Y’all know about spotted lanternflies, right? I don’t have to explain them? (invaders, hordes over-running the landscape, even government officials say to just kill ’em?) Last summer I had a lot of them and I killed every one I was able to kill, given that they’re fast and cunning. This summer, the tree guy inspected my 2 red maple trees — maples are among spotted lanternflies’ top choices for setting up camp. I went outside to ask what the tree guy found, and he told me with some excitement that my property was the only one he’d inspected that had no spotted lanternflies. Not only that, but also not even any egg masses.
This turns out to be not strictly true: the same day I saw a spotted lanternfly on the outside of a window screen three stories above pavement so I couldn’t get to it. And two days later, I saw several more in the maple tree and around thereabouts. And I just now killed one in my house. But never mind because good news, even if temporary, is still heartening; like, it gives you heart. Plus as a savage predator, I enjoy it: grab the flyswatter, smack, it drops, track it down, smack smack smack smack, dead as a doornail, VENGEANCE IS MINE!
Flyswatters work and the reason I know is that the neighborhood kids use them; I buy them, they use them. Back to the tree guy: I think the kids are the reason he found (relatively fewer) of them — in fact, the minute he told me that, the heavens opened and I had an epiphany.
My question began with a social media status update by my friend Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo wrote:
At what point does a “drought” become an “arid climate?”
Paolo posed his question months ago, and at first glance, it seemed like nothing more than a jab at Texan politicians like Rick Perry, who deny climate change even as evidence for it accumulates in their own backyards.
But my mind has circled back to Paolo’s question because it touches on so much more than just rainfall in the Southwest. It’s also about the scientific process, the line between data and interpretation and the role of story in science.
We like to think of science as a dispassionate entity. It’s truth, with a capital T. But the reality is that science is also infused with human values and judgements.
The amount of rain that has fallen (or not) in Texas is a datum, a discrete, measurable, knowable fact. But the human mind does not think in numbers, it thinks in story. The terms drought and arid climate are interpretive labels that scientists attach to data — they’re the stories they tell to make sense of precipitation figures.
Scientists have spent years developing climate models to help them make predictions about the future climate in the Southwestern U.S. These predictions become narratives for explaining the numbers.
I posed Paolo’s question to Richard Seager, a climate scientist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. “A drought is a time when it’s drier than normal,” he told me. “If a drought is not going to end, then it represents a transition to a drier climate.”
…there is a broad consensus among climate models that this region will dry in the 21st century and that the transition to a more arid climate should already be under way. If these models are correct, the levels of aridity of the recent multiyear drought or the Dust Bowl and the 1950s droughts will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.
The problem is that the predicted transition has an amplitude that’s modest compared to the expected year to year or decade to decade variability. “At this point in time, trying to find some emerging trend that is relatively small compared to the natural variability—that’ s a really tricky, almost impossible problem to solve,” Seager says.
Seager calls the severity of the drought going on in Texas right now “quite remarkable,” but says it has also been fairly short. While Texas and the Southwest have experienced drought off and on over the last decade or so, this most recent Texas drought didn’t begin until the fall of 2010, and it seems related to a La Nina event.
Researchers are trying to determine if the “incredibly hot” temperatures hitting the region are linked to human activity, but there aren’t any final conclusions yet, Seager says. It’s possible that the current drought is the result of natural variability, but even so, Seager says, “It’s the kind of event that will become more likely in the region as the amplitude of the anthropogenically induced drying of the region gets stronger and stronger.”
He points to an analogy proposed by climatologist Heidi Cullen. She likens climate change to steroids in baseball. You can’t take any one home run that Barry Bonds hit and say, “a-ha, this one was caused by steroids!” But look at the steroid seasons together and compare them to historic home run data and you can see that the home runs are outside the natural pattern.
In this analogy, a drought is like a single home run. It’s only by looking at it in context that you can determine where it fits with previous patterns. Which means that we won’t be able to definitively say that what we’re seeing in Texas is a more arid climate until we’re fully entrenched in this new normal. Even then, it remains open to interpretation. While the rainfall data themselves are indisputable facts, the criteria that scientists use to define concepts like drought, climate and normal are human constructs. Even when they’re based on science, they’re still judgment calls.
It’s the existential layer to Paolo’s question that intrigues me most. How much contrary evidence do we need before we decide it’s time to update our definition of normal? At what point do we as humans let go of the past — the way things were, the present that we’re used to — and accept the future that we’ve created? When do we quit denying the consequences of our actions and start incorporating them into our collective narrative?
These aren’t scientific questions, they’re philosophical ones, and until society can agree on the answers, debate about climate change will continue.
The last year has been foundation-shaking for me. I went from two parents to zero in less than seven months and I’m trying to figure out exactly how life works now. Soon after the second parent died, my region was plunged into a miserable heat wave that lasted more than a week and made it hard to do anything other than sit inside and feel bad and wonder if this is just what summers are like now, if this is our new climate, and here I am, facing it parentless.
But the heat wave went away and the other evening it rained. I sploshed barefoot in the temporary stream down the middle of the alley, in the rain and the sun, and looked for a rainbow.
I realize that eventually finding yourself with zero parents is the correct order of things. But how on earth do people do it? Because, so far, I don’t like it.
An American: You guys have something called Flying Ant Day. Is this some kind of national holiday?
A British person who is tired of ants: I can see how you’d get there, given the past 14 years of British politics. Quite the opposite, though: it’s the summer day we all dread because unlike other commemorative days, Flying Ant Day is always a surprise. For a few weeks leading up to the event, British publications are stuffed with headlines including “When is flying ant day?”, “Is it flying ant day?” and “Flying Ant Day has arrived“.
Okay but I just looked online and it says Flying Ant Day is a myth.
More misnomer than myth. Does it happen for all ants on the same single day? No. But many colonies do use environmental signals to coordinate their flight, a strategy that minimises any given individual’s odds of being eaten by predators.
Ants turn out to be very good at predicting the weather, and they’re looking for a specific kind of warm and windless day to take flight en masse. So most British people are guaranteed the following experience: one sunny day in mid-summer, usually in July or August after a generally unpleasant wet and warm spell, you’ll step out of your house and find something wriggling in your hair. You’ll grimace and pick it out and then you will notice masses of ants writhing on the ground all around you. Then – as in any good horror movie – your gaze will pan up and take in the flying ant orgy in the sky, as far as the eye can see.
That’s horrible! And I have somany questions. Ants can fly?
They can.
These are normal ants? How do they just suddenly sprout wings?
Based on real adventures in aging. Of which I hope to have more.
(Feel free to add your own.)
It really IS a solid hose reel.
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Getting older is hilarious. Or, at least, that’s the best way to think about it. Here are more signs that time is a damn freight train and your foot it stuck in the tracks.
You can no longer see the instructions on your statin bottle.
You need a nap after going to Home Depot.
You consider that trip to Home Depot an outing, and you announce after that you’re done for the day.
Friday night is laundry night. Saturday night is laundry-folding night.
It’s hard to know what to say, every twist and turn becoming a knot. Forces are crashing, glass flying. I’m up in the mountains where ancient volcanoes choked themselves to death, then eroded for 30 million years into the throaty remnants of a Colorado hotspot. Forests have grown on the rubble and I’ve been walking through some lately that feel healthy, getting enough respite from droughts that their leaves and needles are many and green. Pine cones are falling and I stop to watch them.
The cones that catch my attention are from ponderosa pines. Light and woody, the size of softballs, they let loose one at a time, thumping branch to branch, then half a second of quiet as they fall the rest of the way and land in a nest of needle duff. Their papery seeds fall out as the cone slowly unfolds on the ground.
