Borrowed Time

It hasn’t been a conscious effort on my part but I confess a driver of my approach to each interview for the Borrowed Time series has been my personal hope that I might find the answer to all of the problems we face as a result of the changing climate. By asking authors, activists, scientists and park rangers what they believe are the solutions to the problems, I hope to learn the answers. 

In the hour preceding the scheduled time to interview Bill McKibben, feeling both nervous and excited, I reviewed my outline of questions and had a moment of self-criticism and guilt because I felt most of my questions were designed to seek the answers to all of the problems. So many of them seemed to be variants of How and What can be done? Bill McKibben has written dozens of books on the environment, founded 350.org and is rightly regarded as one of the prominent figures of the ‘leaderful’ (to use his word from our interview) environmental movement. Surely he has all the answers, right? Maybe. I certainly hoped to learn some new magical solutions that he would share with me that aren’t already addressed in his books, statements or articles he has written. 

As stated in this interview, when we started this series we intended to ask everyone what gives them hope. My hope was that this is where I would learn the answers. Bathsheba Demuth’s response – expressing frustration at the question itself and adding, ‘The way we talk about hope is that it’s something given to you rather than something that you make and at this point we really need to be making our hope not imagining someone is going to hand it to us’ was inspiring to me in many ways, including that I stopped asking people what gives them hope. But I brought it up again with McKibben because his most recent book, Falter, opens with a comment on hope and I felt there was a lot to unpack in it. 

For starters, I felt McKibben’s words answered a related question that I asked Derrick Jensen about hope. In Endgame on a chapter dedicated to hope, Jensen defines hope as ‘a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency. It means you are essentially powerless.’ I asked Jensen how he does what he does if hope isn’t a fundamental motivator to his actions. Jensen gave a good answer (listen and find out) but McKibben’s words, ‘I want those who pick up this volume to know that its author lives in a state of engagement, not despair. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have bothered writing what follows’ helped me understand the nuance, despite that Jensen also states in Endgame, ‘I’ve grown accustomed to carrying the daily weight of despair.’

McKibben’s preface also states, ‘A writer doesn’t owe a reader hope’ and in our interview McKibben shares he is neither optimistic or pessimistic about the future. So if there is an answer, perhaps it is that whether one feels despair or not, optimism or pessimism,  ‘engagement is our only chance’ as McKibben concludes chapter one of Falter. 

I first requested to interview McKibben in November of last year and hoped it might be the first of this series. The request made months ago was to discuss his book Falter, which was published in April of last year but instead this interview focused on current events. Two months before Falter was published, David Wallace-Wells’ Uninhabitable Earth was published and I listened to interviews with each author just days apart from one another on KQED. The same week the IPCC was in session and all of the news on the radio was bleak. It was listening to the interviews with McKibben and Wallace-Wells, along with the climate reports, that were the inspiration to address climate change at our Library. This month, like every month it seems, the news about climate change and mass extinction continues to only get worse and worse. 

Yes, the news is bad and it may only continue to get worse. In the context of looking for the answers, I only feel slightly guilty for hoping McKibben might provide them. I feel we already do know the answers but we continue to seek them elsewhere because we don’t want to give up any convenience. We want fast cars, fast food, instant gratification and our way of life in the USA. Just as the reports of climate change become more bleak, the numbers of cases from the pandemic rise every day. Police helicopters have been flying overhead downtown Oakland non-stop as I’ve been writing this and I don’t want to return to what was normal. If there has been a universal answer to the problem of climate change from authors, activists and scientists in this series, perhaps it is simple as do whatever you can and whatever it takes.

My goal is to keep this blog short, optimistic, and filled with enough specific content to encourage you to explore further. Like many of you sheltering-in-place, I’ve been reflecting upon giving back, the additional changes I wish to make to my life, and hopes I have for the future. How will we move forward after COVID-19? What will the world look like next month, year, decade? What changes do we hope to make, and how will we implement them?

While we certainly do not have all the answers now, on April 13, I had the opportunity to sit with two members of the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA): Andres Soto, an activist, and Steve Early, a journalist (both among other things). During our conversation, I gained additional insight about the movement they have been a part of in Richmond, California. In short, the RPA has worked together to become involved in politics and social organizations in the city in order to promote social, political, and environmental policies that they consider nearer to an ideal.

Understand that I am not suggesting that this is the way forward. The RPA provides one 

approach. At the most basic level, this approach is becoming involved and supporting the changes that you hope to be implemented in the community in which you live.

Speaking with them has encouraged me to consider what organizations, people, and policies I wish to support in my current community and how I might better become involved (giving to the local food pantry last week and donating to an organization that supports homeless youth was a start). But, more than this, our April 13 conversation got me reflecting upon the past. While I live in Santa Rosa today, I come from a place where there is a lot of industry like Richmond, a small town in the Ohio River Valley. At times growing up there, I didn’t agree with what I saw and was in the minority. In fact, I may have been more in line with the RPA. Because of this and other reasons beyond politics, I almost always felt at odds with my peers and community. At the time, I saw my status as “different” or “odd” as a negative. However, now that I’ve lived a bit more and continue to learn from mistakes as well as successes, I see that I was just as necessary to them, as they are necessary to me. 

What am I getting at here? 

Although the experiences I had growing up were mostly painful, I am grateful for them for the most part. I know they have shaped who I am and what I believe in today. Even though I have had to learn to accept that some in my hometown will never understand me, I like to think that without me and other perceived “non-aligners” they would not be who they are today, too. While it’s easy to grasp on to simplistic views of places as well as people, more and more, I find myself combatting this notion. No place can be encapsulated by a list of points. Not the Ohio River Valley. Not Richmond, California. No set of people either. 

In the end, we aren’t so different from one another. Not really. We all want the world to be a better place even if we may disagree with what that world should look like. 

That push and pull is what is necessary in our democracy. Your disagreements with me. My disagreements with you. That friction results in a more perfect union for all. I know this may be idealistic, but I truly believe we might work together to change things. For better or worse, that’s what I am: an idealist.

In short, thank you for reading, and it’s okay if you disagree with me or the RPA. However, in my experience, it never hurts to listen in to “the other side.”

For insights from Steve Early and Andres Soto, please visit this YouTube video featuring our original conversation or the condensed discussion as part of our Borrowed Time podcast series. 

The Keystone Pipeline Meets an Organized and Awake, Group of Nebraskans

“Environmentalists have a word for the realization that our planet is in urgent and serious trouble. They call it the ‘oh shit’ moment. “

Mary Pipher has something to offer us in this moment, Spring 2020, when we are shut in our homes, confronting a strange new reality (on top of all the other strange realities of this time), wondering how things are going to unfold. Will we be okay? How can we cope with what’s happening? How can we deal with the uncertainty?

Pipher, a cultural psychologist and best-selling author, has written 10 books including Reviving Ophelia, her most famous, and Women Rowing North, her most recent.  It’s her book The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture, published in a 2013, that offers a helping hand – and a psychologist’s generous ear – to anyone reeling from the climate crisis. Indeed, it can be an effective guide for us during this COVID crisis as well.  She writes in the introduction, “I began this book in the summer of 2010 at a time when the world seemed almost too complicated and frightening for me to manage emotionally.”  

2010 was a significant year for Pipher.  First, she awoke to the shocking urgency of the climate crisis after reading Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth, in which he bluntly tells us: “The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. The stability that produced that civilization has vanished; epic changes have begun….The earth that we knew – the only earth that we ever knew – is gone.”  

A few months later, she was horrified to learn of plans to build the Keystone XL pipeline in Nebraska (and other states) to transport tar sands oil from Canada, impacting farmlands, aquifers, wildlife and more.  So she spoke with a couple of friends. They met, formed a group, and began a successful campaign to stop the pipeline.

In The Green Boat, Pipher reminds us that understanding the emergency of the climate crisis is emotionally traumatic for us, and that we need to take care of ourselves as a result.  “Trauma is the psychological experience of stress when our inner and outer resources are not sufficient to handle what we are facing” she reminds us. And, “Trauma can arise from knowing that the planet is dying and that we are not organizing ourselves to prevent that.”

If we are afraid and worried and overwhelmed, numbing out all the time isn’t going to help. We need to be with the emotional experience of both what is happening to the world and how that is impacting us individually and in our communities. We need accept the truth of what is happening. “Once we face the facts, no matter how disturbing they are, we feel calmer and less crazy,” she writes. And, when we are ready, as Pipher points out, one of the best antidotes to climate trauma is climate action.

The book delivers the positive message that the bad news of the climate crisis (and other global crises, which Pipher calls at times the “global storm”) is interwoven with the good news that we are all in it together and that we have the capacity to work with the situation both personally and in the world.

Pipher tells a very inspiring story of engaged and empowered citizens. That group she and her friends started in 2010, blossomed into a large and effective coalition of farmers, landowners, school teachers, Republicans, Democrats, cowboys, and Indians in Nebraska. Their group joined with others to effectively stop the pipeline’s construction in Nebraska to this day.

Since much of the podcast focuses on the pipeline story, I’ll share here some of my favorite “wisdom” quotes from the book, just to give you a taste:

“We can acquire the skills we need to overcome our sense of doom.”

“Of course people avoid facing problems they have no idea how to solve.”

“Nobody knows what will happen to the planet, but we do know what makes humans stronger, healthier, and more resilient. That is facing the truth, dealing with it emotionally, and transforming it.”

The book gave me hope. I hope you’ll check it out.

Kerry Nelson on behalf of the Mill Valley Public Library

May 24, 2020 is the 30th anniversary of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney surviving an assassination attempt by car bombing in Oakland, CA. It’s also the 30th anniversary of the day they were arrested and labeled terrorists to the public by the FBI. 

I feel a sense of guilt for how much I care about the case of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. There have been greater injustices and there are bigger fish to fry but their story makes my blood boil. I like to think I’m self-aware and I believe I know what I care so much about this piece of history. For starters, the car bombing happened in Oakland, which happens to also be where I live so it’s easy to relate to their story through connection of place. Despite living here off and on for over a decade and loving some of the redwood groves Darryl & Judi fought to protect for even longer, I only learned about their story in recent years. I was watching a different documentary that made quick mention of Earth First! activists being attacked by bomb in Oakland and my eyes widened and jaw dropped at what I had heard. I was shocked to learn that people had been car bombed down the street from where I live.

I then watched Who Bombed Judi Bari? and became more shocked and incensed that the victims of an assassination attempt were framed as the suspects. The blatant contradictions between the evidence and the claims of the FBI exhibited incompetence at best but with implications of something far worse. Twelve years after the bombing, a jury in a federal court sided with Bari and Cherney and found three FBI officers and three Oakland Police Department officers liable for false arrest, violating civil rights, conducting illegal searches and speaking slanderous statements. After a unanimous verdict, Juror Mary Nunn said, ‘The FBI and Oakland (police) sat up there and lied about their investigation. They messed up their investigation, and they had to lie again and again to try to cover up. I’m surprised that they seriously expected anyone would believe them.’

The story of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney is much more than bomb survivors winning a lawsuit against the FBI. Prior to the bombing, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney had been busy organizing Redwood Summer, a series of demonstrations in Humboldt County to protest logging of old growth redwoods. By the spring of 1990, Bari, Cherney and other Earth First! activists and lawyers had already achieved minor victories delaying clearcutting practices. Greg King, who Cherney pays homage to in our interview, identified and named the Headwaters Forest, now a national forest reserve, by trespassing onto Pacific Lumber Co. timber holdings. Starting with an illegal walk in the woods and then followed by many Earth First! blockades, protest rallies, tree sits, and lawsuits over the course of a dozen years with an eventual federal and state purchase of the land, the public can now leisurely explore the remaining 7,500 acres of the forest. 

Judi Bari helped form Local 1 of the Industrial Workers of the World to unionize timber workers at the Louisiana Pacific; the same company that allowed the FBI to conduct bomb instruction classes in a clearcut a month before Bari & Cherney were attacked. In fact, as Cherney notes in our interview, on the very day the bomb instruction classes were taking place in April, 1990, Cherney, King and other Earth First! activists were arrested in Marin County for a public awareness event on the Golden Gate Bridge for the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. 

In our interview, I asked Cherney if he believed his efforts to unionize timber workers, the lawsuits he filed, monkeywrenching activities or organized mass protests were the most effective way to prevent logging of old growth (you will have to listen for the answer!) because he applied all tactics available to bring public awareness and prevention to logging practices in Northern California. By the date of the bombing thirty years ago, Cherney and Bari had already been physically attacked and received many death threats but even after the bombing, both contributed to Redwood Summer and to save the Headwaters Forest – all while the person that planted the bomb remained free and uninvestigated. 

Judi Bari died before the Headwaters Forest Reserve opened to the public and years before her case against the FBI went to trial. It’s been thirty years since she was bombed and no one other than she and Cherney were ever investigated for the act of domestic terrorism. It’s hard to imagine justice for Judi Bari without a legitimate investigation into the attack. Mendocino County, the City of Oakland and environmental groups now recognize May 24 as Judi Bari Day but these tributes are not justice. 

The documentary Who Bombed Judi Bari? includes a TV news clip from the day after the bombing that quickly cuts from a segment about global warming to announcing Cherney and Bari as the suspects and not the victims. The news clip segue exemplifies everything wrong about our nation’s response to climate change and environmentalists: instead of labeling the victims of a violent attack as ecoterrorists, what if the public had heard Judi’s message – to say nothing of the news report on global warming? In the same thirty years since the bombing, more carbon emissions have been released than all of the previous combined years throughout civilized history. This madness is one of the reasons why this case infuriates me. 

I think the thing that draws me most to this story is simply that I admire the actions of the individuals for all of their efforts to save the redwoods with the recognition that I’m too fearful to chain myself to a tree or stand in front of a logging truck. As much as I love old growth redwoods, I’m not willing to make the same sacrifices as Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. But without people like Judi Bari, Darryl Cherney and Greg King standing up, raising banners and raising hell, we would have fewer groves of redwoods standing today.

Our Library sits in a redwood grove so we had hoped to literally use our backyard to examine climate change at the local when we selected redwoods for our monthly theme this month. As beautiful as the trees that surround our building are, they are little babies reaching only over a hundred or so feet into the sky. But over the river and through the woods just one big hill away from our Library in the valley below is grandmother’s house, the Muir Woods National Monument. Muir Woods is home to some of the only old growth redwoods that remain in the Bay Area, trees that live over 2,000 years and ascend over three hundred feet into the sky. 

Before the pandemic broke, our Library was very excited to host NPS Park Ranger Giessell Aguilar to present on all of the wonders of redwoods, some Bay Area deforestation history and how redwoods combat climate change as the tallest sequesters of carbon. We still have high hopes of hosting the event down the road but until then, we were happy to have the opportunity to speak with Aguilar about her personal experiences witnessing the effects of climate change, the science of sempervirens and all of the restoration work Muir Woods National Monument is currently working on with the Redwood Renewal Project.

*Please note Giessell misspoke a single word and intended to credit Save the Redwoods League.

I can’t remember if I expressed this to David Harris before or after the interview but I did let him know it felt kind of silly to have the opportunity to speak with him and limit our conversation to trees. It felt improper to not acknowledge his history, honorable actions, accomplishments and the other ten books he has written but then immediately ask him to share a piece of history from the late 20th century that most people seemed to ignore at the time and few remember today. Thankfully for us, David Harris cares a lot about redwood trees and was happy to vocalize stories and insights on topics he has already put to paper. 

And I now get to express my humility by paying respect to his past: Following his first year in college, in 1964 Harris traveled to Mississippi as part of the Freedom Summer voter registration campaign. I was able to indirectly ask him a question about this in relation to Redwood Summer. In 1966, when Harris was elected student body president at Stanford, pro-war fraternity members forcibly shaved his head. I made no attempt to force a question with a clear cutting analogy to ask about this or his dormitory neighbor Mitt Romney. It didn’t even cross my mind but it is part of his fascinating story. I was able to reference his arrest and prison sentence for draft evasion in the context of activism but out of respect I dared not ask a question about his first wife, Joan Baez, even though she did visit tree-sitter Julia Butterfly Hill and attended rallies to protest logging old growth redwoods. Because Harris happens to live in the same town where my library is located, if we are fortunate, we might get a second chance to ask about his life experiences and other books that don’t always relate to redwoods. 

As Harris wrote in My Redwood Confession, an essay featured in the Save the Redwoods League centennial celebration publication of The Once and Future Forest, trees (one tree named Tree in particular) have in many ways related to and with his life. In our interview, I ask Harris to comment on the seven virtues of redwoods, which I found to be the most beautiful takeaway from the piece. In addition to these virtues, the essay elaborates on his personal relationship with Tree, describes the deforestation history as a massacre and offers an postscript to his book, The Last Stand, in a section that shares the same title as the book. Whereas the book reads as a nonfiction suspense thriller, in My Redwood Confession Harris reflects on this chapter of history as a personal observer to the final clearing of old growth redwoods on timber industry owned property. 

In The Last Stand (the book), Harris tells the tale of the hostile takeover of the Pacific Lumber Co. (PL) in Humboldt County by Texan billionaire Charles Hurwitz. PL had been family owned and operated for over a hundred years and selectively cut redwoods to ensure there would be more redwoods to cut for years to come. Hurwitz secretly purchased most of the stock holdings with a colleague who later went to prison for securities fraud and became the new owner of PL. With Hurwitz as the boss, clearcutting became the practice as PL tripled their cuts each year – until there was nothing left to cut when PL filed for bankruptcy in 2007. But before bankruptcy and pocketing three billion bucks, Hurwitz hit hiccups harvesting his holdings. 

Hurwitz is who Woody Harrelson called out by name when he helped hang a banner over the Golden Gate Bridge in 1996. Six years before Woody climbed the bridge, Greg King attempted a similar escapade and it was he and fellow rabble-rouser Darryl Cherney of Earth First! that emerged as the largest thorns in the side of PL following the takeover in 1985. King trespassed on PL property, identified and named the Headwaters Forest area and then spent the next dozen years fighting to help prevent the old growth from being felled. Along the Pacific Coast, less than 5% of the native redwood forest remains today, much of it in scattered pockets that were in terrain too challenging to cut that are now protected by state and national parks. Headwaters Forest Reserve is the only national forest reserve in the USA and the reserve today is only a fraction of the acreage conservationists hoped to protect. King & Cherney applied legal and illegal tactics to save the trees. Lawsuits were filed to protect wildlife and trees were occupied by activists. The rallies, blockades and other guerilla forms of protest by Earth First! brought public attention to the cause as legal efforts to save Headwaters Forest plodded along. 

PL once had the timber rights to over 200,000 acres of forest in Northern California. Save the Redwoods League purchased land that is now Humboldt Redwoods State Park from PL 99 years ago. The Headwaters Forest Reserve is just under 7500 acres. Most of the trees on PL’s 200,000 acres were cut. Julia Butterfly Hill occupied a tree named Luna on PL property for two years to save it. Many people, including Harris’ first wife, aided Julia Butterfly Hill but it was her sacrifice that saved the tree. David Chain was killed on PL property when a logger felled a tree in his direction. After David Chain was killed, PL agreed not to cut trees within a 100 feet of where he died. When one thinks of all the personal efforts and sacrifices, legal proceedings and a $380 million dollar check to Pacfic Lumber Co. to save under 7500 acres, it’s easy to understand how most of the trees were lost. 

I have my own redwood confessions and story to share. The first confession is that my first memories of redwoods are from Return of the Jedi. My other confession is that just like David Chain and Charles Hurwitz, I too was born Texan. But California has always felt like home and when I saw old growth redwoods in-person for the first time, I was in other-wordly awe. I moved back to Texas eight years ago and spent my final days in California camping in the redwoods in Humboldt County. In my first few days in Texas I visited a state park and while looking at a 500 year old bald cypress tree named Old Baldy that stands 103 feet tall, the only other person on the trail approached me and asked, ‘Have you ever seen a tree this tall?’ I politely and matter of factly responded, ‘Yes, I was camping in the redwoods last week’ and unintentionally insulted her everything is bigger in Texas pride. The moment was one of many in Texas that reminded me that home is where the heart is. From Texas I moved to Alaska, where my favorite trail was in a forest of tall Sitka Spruce and bushy undergrowth. What I loved about it most was that it reminded me of walking among the ferns under tall redwoods. 

I’ve sometimes wondered if each tree had a name – like Luna or Tree – if people might think of trees with more affection and appreciation. As Harris said in our interview, after he made his confession, others told him they have had similar relationships with trees. Trees that have names marked with signs, like Old Baldy, are always the ones people stop and appreciate in the parks. Perhaps if each being had a name, we will finally start to see the forest for the trees. 

Ten years ago I read a book called Salmon in the Trees I found on my grandmother’s bookshelf and quickly became fascinated by the ecological relation between forest and fish – and the eagles and bears that help spread the nutrients around. The following year, PBS aired the documentary Running the Gauntlet highlighting the dams of the Columbia River and their impact on salmon populations. Since then, I’ve hoped for a book like Salmon: A Fish, the Earth and the History of Their Common Fate by Mark Kurlansky. The book covers everything I craved – engaging descriptions of the common species of salmonids, the history of industrial influence on their habitat, an analysis of the problems when humans try to manage nature and all of it presented with the recognition of the biggest threat to salmon today: climate change. 

Salmon is a beautiful book full of photos and recipes to support all of the well written words that convey the urgency to respond to climate change. Mark Kurlansky has authored dozens of books – including novels and children’s books – but is best known (I assume) for his international bestseller Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World published 22 years ago. In between the publication of Cod & Salmon, Kurlansky published World Without Fish and The Last Fish Tale, both of which address precisely what their titles imply. Fans of Cod will enjoy Salmon (the books that is) for its similar approach to write a biography of a fish. The common fate of cod and salmon is that humans have decimated their populations but in Salmon, Kurlansky hits home that despite all prior destructive actions against salmon, climate change is the biggest threat to salmon. If the salinity and temperature of water change as rapidly as scientists anticipate, then there will be no habitable space for salmon. 

The library where I work has a creek running behind the building that was once a vibrant salmon spawning habitat. Because our library wanted to examine climate change at the local level, it made sense to us to literally look at our backyard and spend a month addressing climate change in the context of salmon. Our library selected Kurlansky’s book for our Read it and Weep reading challenge months before it was published by Patagonia because we had faith the book would be just as engaging as Cod. We were right. It’s worth noting Patagonia also produced a new documentary on salmon titled Artifishal, which is accessible to everyone on YouTube, which was the title we planned to screen before the pandemic hit. 

In our interview, I ask Kurlansky to revisit some of the 25 lessons from his book Nonviolence and ask if they apply to the human relationship with salmon. Maybe I’m just a sucker for lists but I really appreciate the 25 lessons from the book as they apply to mankind and I couldn’t help thinking about them in the context of salmon too. In addition to the ones we discuss in the interview, Lesson 23 (Violence is a virus that infects and takes over) made me think of overfishing and Lesson 14 (All debate momentarily ends with an enforced silence once the first shots are fired) made me think of the debates surrounding dams and hatcheries. Lesson 20 (Wars do not have to be sold to the general public if they can be carried out by an all-volunteer professional military) made me think of salmon viewed only as a food source for mankind with fishermen as the willing paid participants in the role of the executioner. 

Perhaps it is inaccurate to think of the history between homo sapiens and salmonids as violent. Our ignorance and indifference has been more destructive to salmon than our intent to harm them. Will those same flaws prevent us from saving salmon and ourselves from climate change?

Today is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and millions, if not billions, of people are sheltering in place at home due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Although most of us might not be spending the day as planned or desired, we still want to acknowledge the day. 

The Brooklyn Public Library has developed a beautiful podcast episode, In Fifty Years, to honor the history of Earth Day while also addressing the climate crisis today. The Austin Public Library and the Mill Valley Public Library also contributed clips from our patrons about Earth Day and climate change but the pandemic altered our intended plans to include more voices and capture more stories from the original Earth Day. Despite the current crisis, staff at BPL did an excellent job developing this episode to recognize Earth Day in the context of a world pandemic. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Fifty years ago today, the United States celebrated the first ever Earth Day.

Reporter Following a green-and-white mock-up of the American flag to the Washington monument grounds, the 2,000 original marchers had swelled to perhaps 10,000 or more by nightfall.

Adwoa Adusei That’s sound from ABC News in 1970, when the news station reported on Earth Day celebrations across the country. This episode of Borrowed, we’re going to be taking us back to 1970. The world has just seen itself in a picture for the first time, taken from the Apollo 8 mission in 1968.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Back here on Earth, the environmental movement was starting to take off. So, Rachel Carson had published her seminal book Silent Spring in 1962, which revealed just how dangerous chemicals like DDT and other pesticides were for the living environment. People across the country were becoming aware of how damaging air pollution from cars and factories were for public health and the health of our planet. On that first Earth Day in 1970, the estimates are that 20 million people took part across the country, with marches and demonstrations and teach-ins. In Boston, students staged a die-in at Logan Airport to protest the pollution being created by air travel. In California, an environmental group marched from Sacramento all the way to L.A. and it took six weeks.

Adwoa Adusei In New York City, for that first Earth Day, Mayor John Lindsay shut down 5th Avenue, from 59th all the way to 14th Street. Union Square became the terminous and center of the New York City Earth Day celebration.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And, right here in Brooklyn, Prospect Park was shut down to cars, and that’s back when cars could still drive the whole length of it. The governor of New York at the time, Governor Rockefeller, took a bike ride through Prospect Park to promote green transportation, and he had photographers and radio reporters in tow.

Adwoa Adusei In Manhattan, the demonstrations were attended by over 100,000 people throughout the city. One speaker after another took to the steps of the New York Public Library in Manhattan. Mayor John Lindsay spoke to the crowd and we’re going to play a little bit of what he said that day. This audio comes to us courtesy NYC Municipal Archives.

John Lindsay New York City was quite beautiful today. And yet oddly enough the more beautiful it can look on an occasion like this, the more we are reminded that the business of pollution is the twin brother of the business of poverty and despair.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Earth Day back in 1970 was framed a little differently I think, than we think of the environmental movement today. A lot of the focus, pretty broadly, was this idea that it was a personal responsibility. That we should clean up our litter and everyone needs to do their part.

John Lindsay And that contribution and commitment goes all the way from the business of taking on each person’s shoulders the responsibility for stopping the littering, for ending the attitude and the indifference, the respect for alternate side parking regulations, and simple housekeeping matters of this kind.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras I like how alternate side parking was a problem 50 years ago, and it’s a problem today. 

Adwoa Adusei Yeah, that’s what people say, right? But Mayor Lindsay also made sure to call for bigger, more structural changes to save the Earth.

John Lindsay I do think that we therefore have a right to call upon our national leaders as well as ourselves to stop the insanity of the use of our resources towards the military industrial complex in this country. And I think, too, that we have a right to ask that the industrial might and technical know-how of America, by carrot and stick systems, by laws, by persuasion, by cooperation, be turned towards the business of the saving of our environment.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras You heard Mayor Lindsay there mention the military industrial complex, and that’s because in 1970, America was in the middle of the Vietnam War, which was incredibly unpopular and a deadly conflict. And, for a lot of people in 1970, it felt like end times. So, these calls for environmental justice and for peace were urgent and passionate.

Adwoa Adusei But, of course, it wasn’t the end of times. Here we are, 50 years later, very much still facing an environmental crisis. And Earth Day is here again. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras But, instead of the Vietnam War, we are now battling the coronavirus pandemic.

Adwoa Adusei So, we’re going to take the opportunity here on Borrowed to look back to the first Earth Day, and ask what that means for us today. I’m Adwoa Adusei.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And I’m Krissa Corbett Cavouras. You’re listening to Borrowed: stories that start at the library.

Adwoa Adusei Before we go any further, I do want to point out that our voices might still sound a bit strange, and that’s because here in New York, we’re still on lockdown, and Krissa and I are recording from our separate apartments.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That’s right. But, we are no less thrilled to be bringing you our latest Borrowed episode. We’re still here for you, remotely, and we hope you’re all doing okay.

Adwoa Adusei So, to get back to Earth Day, another speech on April 22 in 1970 that resonated with us when we were doing our research on the first Earth Day was from Margaret Mead, the anthropologist made famous by her studies of Samoan culture. Professor Mead was teaching at Columbia at the time, and she spoke to a crowd at the Natural History Museum. Here’s sound from that speech. It’s a little fuzzy but it’s also courtesy of NYC Municipal Archives.

Reporter Dr. Mead, I’d just like to ask you this: in your own opinion, how would you characterize the present dangers faced in this country right now today?

Margaret Mead Well, we face killing, lake by lake, stream by stream, estuary by estuary, all our waters where our fish breath and we face our cities strangling themselves in waste, in decayed schools, deteriorated buildings …

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Dr. Mead’s outlook was very grim in that speech in 1970. And today, I don’t think she’d love to know that state of the environment is in fact even grimmer. The Union of Concerned Scientists is predicting that by the end of the 21st century, 100 million people will be displaced by sea level rise and 800 million people who live in poverty will go hungry because of damage to crops. And, according to the IPCC, which is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in order to prevent the worst of the impacts of climate change, we have to keep the global temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, and doing that requires the world to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050. So, on the 80th anniversary of Earth Day, in 30 years, every society on our planet has to make drastic changes to the way we live.

Adwoa Adusei Even in 1970, people were thinking about what a future impacted by climate crisis would look like. Here’s another journalist questioning Margaret Mead:

Reporter Do you have … some people will say a specific date in the future, if corrective measures are not taken by then, man will not survive? 

Margaret Mead We don’t know that much. I mean, there are people who say … people who say in 20 years the Earth will begin to be uninhabitable. I should say it’s begun to become uninhabitable in many places right now. 

Reporter Including New York? 

Margaret Mead Well, New York is one of the least habitable cities. It’s a place I prefer to live, but I can’t think why.

Adwoa Adusei I see what you did there, Margaret. Margaret Mead just made a joke there about New York being uninhabitable, but I think this is good place to mention that social and economic inequality really determine who is impacted by climate change. Here in the West, we tend not to see what we don’t want to see, but over this 50 year span, there are lots of “uninhabitable” spaces where people have no choice but to live and stay.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Exactly, and it gets closer to home, too. Social and economic inequality impacts people’s susceptibility to environmental disasters, even right here in Brooklyn. Greenpoint, which of course is now such a trendy place to live, was actually a very working class neighborhood in the middle of the 20th century, and it was the site of one of the largest oil spills in the United States. It destroyed the natural environment there and endangered human health. And, as we learned with Superstorm Sandy, Brooklyn neighborhoods that have been historical disinvested, like Coney Island and Redhook, took years to recover from the impact of that storm. We’ve got Borrowed episodes about both of those moments in history, and we’ll put links to those in the show notes so that you can listen back.

Adwoa Adusei So, to return to the the question that the journalist asked Margaret Mead 50 years ago: how long until we start seeing the worst of the environmental degradation? It’s a scary question, and for many communities, it’s already too late to reverse climate change. Scientists still don’t know, and that fear and uncertainty can paralyze us. So we were listening pretty closely when Dr. Mead was asked this next question.

Reporter What areas do you see for optimism, Dr. Mead?

Margaret Mead Man has solved many, many problems in the past. We’ve learned to set ourselves a problem and solve it. There’s no reason why we can’t do it. We have the tools, we have the computers. Without them, I’d hate to think what we’d do. We’ve got everything now except the political and moral will.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras It may have been a little bit hard to hear the end of that tape there, but it bears repeating. Dr. Mead said: “We’ve got everything now, except the political and moral will.” And, that feels pretty consistent with the situation we’re in today: we still do have the tools and the intelligence to solve this problem. We just lack this idea of political and moral will, as a nation, to act aggressively and not let up on fixing climate change.

Adwoa Adusei From an individual standpoint, this is still a really important question: What gives us hope? So, a few months ago, Brooklyn Public Library collaborated with two other library systems: Mill Valley Public Library in California and Austin Public Library in Texas, and asked similar questions to the ones that Margaret Mead was asked 50 years ago. The first question was: what motivates you to act on climate change? And the second question was: what gives you hope?

Krissa Corbett Cavouras So, let’s hear some answers to that first question. 

Andrew Murphy What motivates you to act on climate change? 

Glenda Sharpe Um, my children and my grandchild, and the fact that I got to grow up in such a beautiful area and I don’t want to see the destruction and it made impossible for people to enjoy life as much as I’ve enjoyed life.

Kate Abel I’m motivated by the richness and uniqueness of planet earth. While there may be life on other planets, we haven’t found it yet. And it may not resemble anything we’ve known. Humans are just one of myriad species on the planet and we no more deserve it than does every other creature.

Susan Augenbraun Terror? Honestly. I mean, it’s … you know, I guess maybe some people do, but I don’t come to activism because I enjoy it or because it’s fun. I do it because I can’t stand to think about, like, the idea of not acting when the crisis is so severe.

Christina Shin Since becoming pregnant, I feel a greater sense of urgency and commitment with acting on climate change. I question and wonder, what will my daughter inherit?

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That was Glenda Sharpe from Mill Valley, California, Kate Abel from Austin, Texas, Susan Augenbraun from right here in Brooklyn, and Christina Shin from Austin again.

Adwoa Adusei At Brooklyn Public Library, our producer Virginia visited an event at Central hosted by 350 Brooklyn, the local chapter of a national environmental action organization. That event was part of a monthly series on climate change that has been happening at the library for a while, and although all events at the library have stopped because of the coronavirus pandemic, that particular panel back in February was pretty relevant to today’s episode because it was all about how climate change impacts public health. Nurses from the New York State Nurses Association and a public health professional spoke about the illnesses that are caused by environmental pollution — illnesses such as asthma, cancer, and heat stroke. Here’s Denise Patel, who moderated the discussion. She’s a public heath professional who works at Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives.

Denise Patel I was working in New Jersey when Superstorm Sandy hit. Superstorm Sandy really gave me the impetus to look at the health impacts of climate change. And when I started doing that, I learned about all the other ways that climate change is going to be impacting our health. Everything from the disasters that we see in the news to crop devastation, to the increases of allergies because of prolonged warmer seasons, the spread of infectious diseases.

Dora Acevedo What really motivated me was going on the medical missions. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That last voice was Dora Acevedo, a nurse practitioner at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx.

Dora Acevedo I’ve been to Puerto Rico right after Maria. I’ve been to the Philippines two years after Typhoon Haiyan, you know, and you see the devastation. It’s like … and these are storms that were mega storms. And then just seeing the changes, particularly where I live. Because I live around trees and grass: plants have blooming sooner, the animals are acting differently. It just makes you more scared. And then now, all these new viruses are coming out, you know? 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras That virus she’s mentioning there at the end, that was Covid-19. Back in February, when we collected these interviews, the virus was just beginning to shut down whole provinces in China.

Adwoa Adusei At the panel, Dora talked about how rising temperatures and global climate change impacts all organisms, including vectors or transmitters of viruses like mosquitos, bats and ticks. She pointed out that, as our climate continues to change, it’s hard to predict how it will impact the spread of diseases. As of now, there is no evidence that climate change increased the spread of Covid-19, but we do know that other diseases, like malaria and yellow fever, which are usually confined to areas with high average temperatures, have been spreading to new places as environments heat up. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And there have been a few articles written recently comparing the threat of climate change to the current pandemic, making the point that, as disruptive as this current health crisis has been, the impacts that climate change will have are going to be even more disruptive if we continue on this path. Right now, nurses like Dora are on the front lines of fighting the Covid-19 pandemic in the Bronx. But, months earlier, she was already making that connection between the health of her community and the climate crisis.

Adwoa Adusei It’s strange to go back even just two months, to the lead up to Earth Day 2020. Before the coronavirus pandemic, students and environmental activists were planning massive strikes for Earth Day. Marches were being planned for New York City, to recapture some of the urgency and energy of the first Earth Day back in 1970, when New Yorkers took to the streets.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Now, those strikes have gone digital. We’ll put links on our webpage to some ways you can participate in the global action on Earth Day this year.

Adwoa Adusei And since we can’t gather in big crowds, we wanted to crowd-source some nature sounds from around Brooklyn and farther afield. We asked people to open their doors and record their environment, to leave us all with a little bit more hope. We asked that last question that was posed to Margaret Mead 50 years ago, on the first Earth Day: what areas do you see for optimism? Or, what gives you hope?

Mimi Bluestone What most gives me hope is seeing the growth of the climate movement, seeing the increased awareness among the general public of the climate crisis, catastrophe, emergency …

Virginia Marshall I’m sitting on my stoop in Clinton Hill and there is a bumble bee crawling into a crack in front of me. The streets have been relatively clear recently because everyone is staying inside, which means there’s more sounds of nature around.

Jen I hate to say this, but I don’t have a lot of hope. I tend to … and it’s not that I always try to see the worst, it’s just I’ve seen example and example of, you know, people trying to do better and just getting thwarted at every turn, and I don’t have a lot of hope. That’s really sad, but it doesn’t stop me from trying. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras I’m sitting in this triangular garden space in the northeast corner of Sunset Park, the park itself after which the neighborhood is named. Since the pandemic and since the social distancing and lockdown measures that the state has taken, this has become as far afield as I’ll bring my son once or twice a week. Just to get a little nature, and grass and peer at wood chip piles and look for ants. He has noticed and we have noticed the minute changes in the vegetation here in this garden in a way that I probably wouldn’t have in other Springs because I’m just walking past it and normally I’m just looking and saying, “oh the daffodils are out.” But now that I’ve been in this triangle of garden for twice a week for a month, I’m noticing different plants and when they’re blooming …

Tula You know what gives me hope is that there are many, many people out there, young people … they give me hope because they’re speaking up, they’re doing things. My generation is not doing anything. They’re just very complacent and just very much involved with their own material existence.

Sarah I think the optimism of young people, like little children who plant a tree or, you know, see a flower and get excited, and they’re not so jaded. You know, they pause and look at things like that. And, that gives me hope that we can turn this around.

Adwoa Adusei That was Mimi Bluestone from Brooklyn, Jennifer, Tula and Sarah from Mill Valley, with narration and nature sounds from Sarah Ivry in Salisbury, Connecticut, and from our producer Virginia and Krissa — all in Brooklyn.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras And now it’s time for our Book Match segment. Virginia spoke with Margaret Day, who put together a list of book recommendations for earth day.

Virginia Marshall Margaret, thank you so much for joining us on Borrowed today.

Margaret Day Thank you for having me.

Virginia Marshall So, you’ve got a list of books for our listeners for Earth Day this year. I’d love if you could tell me about a few of your favorite titles. 

Margaret Day Sure, so I have a lot of favorite titles. It was hard for me to put together this list. But one fun thing I thought it would be great to do is reach out to non-profits working on the front lines of the environmental movement and ask them to provide us with personal recommendations of books that inspired them and would inspire other readers to take climate action. So, the first book that I have here is a recommendation from our partner, 350 Brooklyn. The book is Rising: Dispatches from the American Shore by Elizabeth Rush. Rush travels around the United States to the Gulf Coast, Miami, the Bay Area, the Northeast and our very own New York City, and she reports on the impact of climate change and rising seas on our coastal communities. 

Virginia Marshall That sounds awesome. What’s the next book that you have for us? 

Margaret Day My next book was recommended by the Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy who has done incredible work to restore city parkland on the Brooklyn waterfront. Their pick is the 2006 best-selling book by Mark Kurlansky: The Big Oyster. This is a history of New York told through the surprising and entertaining history of the oyster which once thrived in New York harbor but was then tragically wiped out after only 100 years of human intervention.

Virginia Marshall That’s awesome and I want to mention, too, that I was so surprised when I learned that there used to be oysters around Brooklyn’s waterways. And is there anything in the book about how they’re coming back?

Margaret Day Yes, definitely. There’s a lot of work going on right now to restore the oyster beds around New York City. They are really important for filtering our water. So, as organizations like Jamaica Bay Parks Conservancy and there’s also a great group called the Billion Oyster Project, as they work to restore our oyster beds, we will have cleaner water.

Virginia Marshall Speaking of the waterfront, I can actually hear the seagulls in your backyard now.

Margaret Day That’s true, they’re right outside. 

Virginia Marshall You must be right on the water there.

Margaret Day I am right on the water. I live right on Jamaica Bay, which is an area where you can find oyster beds and where they are working to restore.

Virginia Marshall That is really cool. And you have one more book for us.

Margaret Day I do. My third and final recommendation is from the NYC chapter of Sunrise Movement, a super energetic and youth-led organization fighting for political action on climate change. And the book they chose is called This is an Uprising: How Non-Violent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-first Century by Paul and Mark Engler. It was published in 2016. So the Engler brother offer a compelling investigation of non-violent mobilizations throughout history. This includes environmental movements like Earth First, but they really dive into a whole diversity of movements and they break down the strategies that led to their successes. And then, last thing I should mention is that Sunrise is starting a book club. So, listeners that are hungry for reading groups should check out the NYC chapter online. Looks like they have some great titles lined up.

Virginia Marshall Great, well listeners you can find a whole lot more books that Margaret and these local organizations have chosen especially for Earth Day, by going to our website: BKLYN library [dot] org [slash] podcasts. Margaret, thank you so much.

Margaret Day Thank you for having me.

Adwoa Adusei And we promised you another group storytelling project. Over three days, people from all across New York and even out of state contributed one sentence to a growing story. 

Krissa Corbett Cavouras This one ended up being a bit dystopian, but we all had fun. And, listeners, you can create your own group story to stay connected with your community during lockdown — check out our webpage for instructions on how to do that. And now, the story:

Reaching her hand out, as if it could touch beyond the glass pane, Eve thought to herself: Wow, it really does look like a giant floating blue marble. Her throat closed as she felt a sudden, keen pang of just how many years it would be before there was even the chance of seeing her family again, but then Eve breathed in deep, closed her eyes, and tried to focus on the exciting discoveries she would make on the new planet. 

Suddenly Eve’s scalp prickled, and as she turned her head slowly, she saw something that shouldn’t be this far out. Feeling the chill of the sterile recycled air, Eve studied the object on her screen. It looked like an old satellite that had gone dark centuries ago, only with scintillating crystalline protuberances growing out of it.

Could it be? No, Eve thought to herself, it can’t. Eve couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen something like it. But then, a trickle of fear … She reached desperately for the controls trying to contact mission base, they needed to know that it was back. They needed to know that they were trying to invade again. She set her jaw grimly, trying not to think of the last time the Titans came. She opened the communications link, trying to calm the storm in her brain.

But something was wrong with the linkup: when Eve pushed the button, the only sound that came from the sound panel in front of her was a crackle and then a long, low beep. She’d have to try reasoning with the Titans directly … But how? Eve new that all forms of communication had been tried in those days, when the Titans came and nearly wiped out humanity. But nothing worked, and when the invaders left as suddenly as they arrived, no one left alive knew what they looked like or what they wanted.

But Eve wasn’t alive. An advanced AI bot created centuries ago by the very same family she still served, Eve battled the Titans then and she would face them again now. She knew what they wanted then: but what if things had changed? Eve clenched her fists as the crystals on the satellite began to glow.

Eve jumped out of her seat and walked toward the escape pod, calculating how quickly she could reach the satellite, and hoping the pod’s protective shield would be enough. Enclosed in a container not much bigger than herself, she exited the relative safety of the ship and entered the true vastness of the universe. The glowing satellite seemed to twist in space toward her. Then, just as she shifted into cruising speed, Eve saw a flash of green light and the pod halted. A voice, seemingly in her head and yet echoing all around her, boomed a message. Although crisply audible, the message was utterly incomprehensible to Eve, who could not even discern what language it was in. Nevertheless, it left her with a sinking feeling–a bad omen in an environment lacking gravity–that she should not go on. 

Eve had decided to leave work in the first place because of its own internal warfare that had emerged after the Titans’ departure. And as new societies formed and the competition for resources severed the ties among its people, Eve realized that of all the emotions she had evolved to feel, sadness was the one she could no longer bear. As a centuries old AI bot, she had become fluent in dozens if not hundreds of languages and could communicate with both humans and animals, this being her first language barrier in decades, she wondered if this could be her true mission.  Maybe she wasn’t escaping earth, maybe she was going to finally save it. 

Using a cleverly encoded neural network, Eve sat in a paused escape pod, and learned the language of the Titans. Finally she could understand what they had been trying to tell her all along. A flash of green light again shot forth from the ancient artifact, and the same message Eve had heard before, once incomprehensible, now boomed with astonishing clarity: “FOR THE LAST TIME, TURN OFF THE BLINKERS OF YOUR SPACE STATION. THE NEUTRON RAYS HAVE BEEN ERODING OUR ATMOSPHERE FOR A MILLENNIA. EITHER LEARN HOW TO OPERATE YOUR VEHICLE PROPERLY OR GET OUT OF SPACE.”

Stunned, and still bathed in the green light of the interstellar warning, Eve could perceive a murmur in the distance.

“Do you think they’ll get it this time, Glorbax?”

“If they haven’t figured out neural networks by now, then they deserve to be annihilated again. Oh crap, this was still recording…”

Elated at finally decoding the Titan’s message, Eve’s mood darkened once she realized there was no one left in the station to turn off the blinkers. Her mission to save the few humans left on earth was futile. 

But what if I don’t have to save them, Eve thought. They’ve never treated me as an equal anyway. And with that, she says to the Titans: “I choose option B! Get them out of space!” She presses the emergency bomb release button and aims the bomb towards the ship. As the ship explodes and the blinkers fade away, she rides off into the horizon and thinks to herself, “Rock and roll never dies!”

Adwoa, Flatbush, Brooklyn. Yesha from Flatbush, Brooklyn. Carl Fossum, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Hasina, from Queens. Lauren, from Greenpoint. Kat, from Redhook, Brooklyn. Virginia, from Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Christopher, Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. Rachel Tiemann, South Slope, Brooklyn. Cassie Hickman, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Melissa, Kensington, Brooklyn. Anna Williams, Astoria, Queens. Becky, Manhattan. Brynna, from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Zoe Marshall, SoHo. Jamnah, SoHo, Manhattan. David Giles, Queens. Elizabeth Kurth, Kristiana Kruth, Alexander Kurth, Chelmsford, Massachusetts.

Adwoa Adusei Borrowed is brought to you by Brooklyn Public Library and is hosted by me, Adwoa Adusei, and Krissa Corbett Cavouras. You can find a transcript of this episode at our website, BKLYNLibrary.org/podcasts.

Krissa Corbett Cavouras We’d like to thank Mill Valley Public Library and Austin Public Library who collaborated in asking staff and patrons to share their hopes and motivations about climate change. A special shout out to the podcast and climate change project called Borrowed Time, which was started by Andrew Murphey at Mill Valley Public Library .. it’s a place for public libraries across the country to share what they are doing to act on climate change. You can see what they’re up to at borrowed-time.org

Adwoa Adusei Borrowed is produced and written by Virginia Marshall with help from Fritzi Bodenheimer, Jennifer Proffitt, Meryl Friedman and Robin Lester Kenton. Our music composer is Billy Libby.  

Krissa Corbett Cavouras Borrowed will be back in two weeks. Until then, open your window and give thanks for the outdoors. We’ll get back out there soon.

‘Instead of planting a tree, how about not cutting them down?’ – Derrick Jensen

A few weeks ago I saw an image of an egg shaped hill that had been clearcut and at first I thought that it was the patchy hair on someone’s head undergoing chemo treatment. I’ve always had poor vision, often misread words and apparently also sometimes misidentify what I’m looking at. In that moment of misidentification, the obvious analogy that the forests are also sick jumped out at me like a sore thumb, which is also an indicator of poor health. 

Forests currently cover approximately thirty percent of all land on Earth but about fifty percent of the world’s forests have already been cut down by humans. Trees absorb the carbon dioxide humans exhale and also trap carbon emissions from the industrial world paved over their roots. Despite the obvious benefits of trees to combat climate change, forests continue to be logged, cleared and burned for industry. Derrick Jensen has written two books on deforestation and the timber industry: Railroads and Clearcuts and Strangely Like War. I planned to frame most of my questions for our third interview around Strangely Like War and focus on redwoods but we managed to speak for an hour and barely discussed the book. 

With images of sickly stumps in mind, I anticipated discussing some of the economic motivators for deforestation addressed in Strangely Like War (co-written by George Draffan) and also the role of the US Forest Service, who recently published a report titled ‘Quantifying the Monetary Value of Alaska National Forests to Commercial Pacific Salmon Fisheries.’ I had planned to reference this report in our last interview about the perceived value of salmon but didn’t get to it and then thought I would reframe it in this interview from the forest perspective. The timing of the report coincides with a ruling pending from the Forest Service and Department of Agriculture on the Roadless rule in the Tongass Forest. The president, both Alaskan senators and the governor of Alaska all want to lift the restrictions of the Roadless Rule to allow for more logging in the national forest, even though local timber companies don’t want to log in the area. Not surprisingly, none of the local Alaskan Native tribes want this repeal nor do local fisherman that rely on salmon. Even the local tourism industry opposes the repeal because they are understandably concerned that people won’t visit the area for its beauty if it’s not beautiful. Despite the opposition to the repeal from local parties that would be affected, North America’s largest rainforest seems on track to be logged. We didn’t discuss the report in either interview but as the name implies, the federally funded research was to determine the economic value of forests to the economy of the salmon fishing industry. The findings are that from 2007-2016, the forests in Southeast Alaska spawned an average of 48 million salmon each year, averaging $88 million annually which accounts for 25% of all salmon caught in Alaska. One of the points Strangely Like War stresses is that American tax dollars pay for deforestation. 

Deforestation is not a thing of the past and although Strangely Like War was published seventeen years ago, lines such as ‘Our economic system rewards destructive behavior’ and ‘All losses permanent, all victories temporary’ still ring true. Although we didn’t get to talk about the perceived value of salmon or forest, I did attempt to ask about the perceived value of redwoods. Redwood trees can grow over 300 feet tall, live for over 2000 years years and provide the home to a species of salamander that never needs to touch the ground. In addition to being the tallest carbon consumers, healthy redwoods generate more rainfall, prevent erosion and flooding. The trees have evolved to defend themselves against insects, fire and fungal infection. What they can’t defend themselves against is people. 95% of old growth redwoods have been cut down. Some of the tallest trees still standing are in Jensen’s neck of the woods. One of my questions from the interview is regarding the plan to build a boardwalk to the Grove of Titans, whose location has previously been undisclosed in an effort to protect the trees, but the GPS coordinates and step-by-step directions have been shared online resulting in thousands of visitors unintentionally destroying the habitat. 

Jensen’s response to my question reminded me of a recent experience I had in a forest in Napa County that was only opened to the public a few months ago. Most redwoods grow within 30 miles of the Pacific Ocean and grow so tall to drink the coastal fog in the sky but with roots in a wet canyon, the redwoods near Angwin are able to thrive almost 60 miles from the ocean. It’s worth noting that there has been a 33% decrease of fog in the 20th century due to global warming (It’s being replaced by smog). I was very excited to see some of the most eastern growing redwoods in California but had a disappointing experience similar to the example that Jensen mentions in our interview. The following is a letter I wrote to the Forest Manager at Pacific Union College and the author of an article in Bay Nature Magazine following my visit. The Forest Manager wrote me a nice response. I wasn’t planning for anyone else to read the letter but because it aligns with the interview, I thought I may as well share it here. 

Hi,

I was so excited to see the article in BAY NATURE announcing public access to the forest behind PUC. My partner and I love exploring new (to us) redwood groves. We’ve been to the most northern redwoods in Oregon so it was a treat to see some of the most inland redwoods too.

We went today thinking the Super Bowl would minimize the use and indeed we only saw five other groups of people. It was nice to have such a quiet time to ourselves exploring the trails. We also have a dog and because he is often not allowed on trails, we were happy to have the opportunity to take him with us. 

Of the five other groups of people that we encountered, four of them also had dogs, two of which had two dogs. If that sentence was hard to follow, my point is that there were a total of six other dogs. Of those six dogs, not a single one of them was on a leash. 

One of the dogs was jogging with its owner and they were coming in the opposite direction that we were walking. The dog, who was behind its owner, started to poop so I alerted the owner. My partner overheard me and then noticed the dog pooping so yelled a little louder (I’m soft-spoken – but I’m very certain the man heard me) and repeated, ‘Hey, your dog is pooping.’ He kept jogging and my partner then facetiously said, ‘Thanks!’ He overheard that too but did not speak a single word. 

My partner was annoyed that he pretended to not hear us. I had a very different perspective because I was making eye contact with him when I first alerted him that his dog was pooping. He wasn’t pretending not to hear – he simply didn’t care. I was tempted to say he didn’t give a shit, except that he did leave a big one right on the trail. 

The encounter left a very sour feeling for both of us. It was otherwise such a nice day and each of us tried to not let that moment ruin the day. It didn’t – but it also did. We didn’t speak about it much but when we did, it clearly bothered my partner as much as it bothered me. 

So why am I writing to you? I admit I’m not certain. Maybe I just need to vent – I certainly don’t expect you to somehow change the encounter. When I was walking on the trails following that moment, and after passing five other unleashed dogs and stepping over plenty of other dog shit, I considered writing to you to suggest maybe rethinking public access to the trails. I sensed that everyone else we encountered was local – there just seemed to be an air of familiarity with the space with everyone we encountered. We probably looked like tourists with our cameras out. 

I know that I am also writing because this experience was not an isolated incident, even though it was my first time to the forest. I consider the Bay Area my home but I moved away for seven years and only returned two years ago. In the two years that I’ve been back, I’ve just been shocked at how people interact with nature these days. My partner and I enjoy tide pooling and it seems like every single time we go tide pooling, we are disgusted by the actions of everyone around us. We have seen children throw bat stars against rocks and others impaling crabs with sticks. In each of those examples, we reacted with the same words: ‘What are you doing?’ and each time the parents emerged when they heard those words only to defend their children and tell us not to speak to them. I can bring this thought back to dog poop: when we were at Glass Beach in Fort Bragg, and because everyone present was collecting beach glass and ignoring everything else, my first thought was that they will have to change the name once all the beach glass has been collected (I wonder how many of them actually keep it) and then I saw some dog poop on the beach and thought they should change the name to Dog Shit Beach because then perhaps everyone would collect the shit off the beach with the same gusto as the beach glass. 

So back to the jogger: aside from his actual actions, behavior and entitlement, the thing that bothered my partner was that in her words, he was part of the ‘get away with it culture’ – he has access to the park to jog, he did not follow the rules, he left it in worse shape than when he arrived but there are no consequences and he might back again tomorrow leaving more shit on the trail from an unleashed dog. I’ve worked in an organization that would change policy because a single person ruined something for everyone and I don’t think that’s the right reaction. But there should be consequences for people like that. And if you don’t want your trails full of shit and dogs running unleashed, you do need to do something. Maybe a few weekends of citations would change the locals’ behavior? I don’t know if that’s the answer but if nothing can prevent that behavior, then perhaps your forest would be better off by denying access to humans. I care much more for those trees than my access to them. 

Sorry for the long message but I am sick of seeing people like this in beautiful places.

Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait by Bathsheba Demuth is the best book I’ve read in the last year but before raving about it, I want to share a story.

One morning when I was living in Alaska I woke up with the song ‘Celia of the Seals’ by Donovon in my head. I remember drinking coffee in bed while listening to the song over & over that morning. The song was inspired by Celia Hammond, a 1960s supermodel that often appeared on the cover of Vogue magazine and often in fur coats. Hammond, while still a model, became an animal rights activist and protested fur for fashion. Donovon’s song, in short, is a protest song against clubbing baby seals to death. Later that morning I ran into a friend at an arts & craft fair, who showed me the sealskin pillow she had just purchased for her husband as a birthday gift. Out of my own amusement of the coincidence, I responded by sharing with her that I had just listened to Donovon’s song on repeat. The contrast between purchasing seal products and song protesting seal products seemed to generate some brief awkwardness between us and she quickly introduced me to the Alaskan Native artist that made the pillow as if to say, ‘See, it’s okay’ and then asked him, ‘You didn’t club the seal, did you?’ to which he said it had been shot and then most humbly added, ‘Poor seal.’ I’ll come back to this after I rave about the book.

My own experience and interest in Alaska no doubt provided some bias in my appreciation of Demuth’s book but despite that, it still stands as an amazing piece of work. It is more than an environmental history of a place but uses a single place to capture so many other substantial global implications about humanity, civilization and the ‘nonhuman world’ to use the author’s words. For me to say the place itself, the Bering Strait, is objectively unique might be subjective but I’ll say it all the same. The strait’s narrow point separates two continents just south of the Arctic Circle with fifty miles of salt water that turns to ice in winter, and is home to walrus, whale and seal in the seas and wolves, caribou and fox on land. Ravens observe them all from the sky. It is also home to indiginous people that have lived in the region for thousands of years. The span of history Demuth focuses on is the last 200 hundred years, which includes the time before foreign whaling ships arrived but in short order covers the Soviet and American (IE communist and capitalist) pillaging that impacted the natural environment and all lifeforms that call Beringia home. The book is beautifully framed with recognition that the lifespan of a bowhead whale has observed all of this history.

The geographical place is as alluring as its inhabitants and history but what makes this book so special is Demuth’s exceptional writing craft and storytelling. The stories of the non-human world are categorized in five sections (sea, shore, land, underground, and ocean) that flow as seamless as the rising and falling tide. Demuth exquisitely describes the value of walrus, not only in the capitalist or communist sense of value, but primarily the natural value of walrus: their tusks stir nutrients from the seafloor that release nitrogen into the water that allows photosynthetic organisms to bloom – and the bloom feeds squid, clam, small fish and tube worm. Without walrus, the ecosystem falls apart. The same is true of every other animal species that call the Bering Strait home, as well as the people that depend on them.

Demuth’s words are equally elegant as powerful – the line I quote in the interview, ‘Death made invisible by those who consume it’ is just one phrase of many that profoundly, by virtue of being blunt, express and reinforce the destruction to Beringia by foreigners –  ‘Knowledge of the whales was eradicated from the consumed products’ or that yankees ‘Took ivory and pelts in exchange for alcohol and starvation’ paint the reality of the damage done. More than gut-punch phrases, Demuth can capture complexities in a single sentence: ‘At the end of the 19th century federal policy toward native people conflated christianity with civilization, civilization with progress, and progress with productive growth, which came from individuals taking raw nature and working it into valuable things sold for profit.’ Literary references in the final pages of the book (‘Springs were silent. The population was a bomb.’) followed by one more gut-punch phrase (‘Pollutants filled streams and bloodstreams’) prompted me to request an interview to be based on a single page from the book.

By the time of the interview I had abandoned my plan to base the interview on a single page and struggled to find the right way to approach my questions because, as I shared with Demuth, her book left no question unanswered and covered everything a reader such as myself could hope for. In fact, the edited episode consists of two interviews spliced together because I felt I missed my mark during the first interview. I’m ethically bound to share that I also took liberty and replaced an original question with an overdubbed one, which brings me back to my story about Donovon and sealskin. 

For many years before I woke up that morning in Alaska with ‘Celia of the Seals’ in my head, I identified with the views of the singer as it was pretty easy to oppose the concept of clubbing seals. But my time in Alaska changed that opinion and not because I briefly met a man that had shot a seal and made a pillow with its skin. I learned and observed first-hand three points from Demuth’s book: 1. people that have lived in that region sustainably for thousands of years are dependent on the resources available and 2. foreign imposition, be it capitalism or communism, forced a demand on the supplies and 3. consumers of the supplies are more to blame for the death of the seals than the person that clubbed (or shot) the seal. 

The question I overdubbed was not about ‘Celia of the Seals’ but rather a different song by Donovon – ‘The Universal Soldier’ in which the singer casts blame on all soldiers in all wars for their complicity in their acts of violence. It’s a logical argument – if there are no soldiers, then the leaders can’t send anyone to battle. I asked Demuth if the same view applied to the whalers with harpoons in hand or the miners destroying the land and polluting the water in search of gold but in the final edit removed my framing of the question about Donovon. I don’t mean to suggest that I now approve of clubbing baby seals but just that it is more complicated than universal condemnation. The executioner shouldn’t be judged when the jury is wearing fur. Or something like that – I’m not as good of a writer as Demuth. A documentary film called The Angry Inuk exemplifies the complexities of modern sealskin products. When indigenous people that have lived sustainably for thousands of years on natural resources in their environment have a capitalist system imposed on them, how else can they make an income in this new system without capitalizing on what is available to them? 

I no longer share Donovon’s views of either song and while I’m being critical of him, I’ll add a few more words of commentary to further rip him and say his songs are only pleasant to my ears because of his producers that helped arrange the songs. But before either of Donovon’s songs came to mind in the context of Floating Coast, I started thinking of a different song as soon as I began reading the book, which is Dem Bones by James Weldon Johnson. Because the head bone is connected to the neck bone and the neck bone is connected to the shoulder bone and the shoulder bone is connected to the back bone. In Floating Coast, Demuth beautifully hits home how each form of life in the Bering Strait is connected to all other forms of life. Any disruption or destruction to the balance affects everyone and everything. The Bering Strait provides an easy example to see this truth but the same is true of every ecosystem.