In the Weeds

In the second installment of our series on climate change, I talk to environmental journalist and science curator for TED Talks David Biello about his book, The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth's Newest Age. Biello argues that, culturally, we’re still prey to the false notion that there’s a divide between the human and the natural, when, in fact, we humans are dependent on the natural world for our survival and are, furthermore, affecting every corner of the world, no matter how remote. We explore this notion of the Anthropocene - the geologic term meant to define an era in which humans are having such a dramatic effect on the earth that we will leave our mark in the geologic record. Biello argues we need to take ownership of our oversized role and become better, more deliberate and thoughtful stewards of our home. Along the way, he also has lots of interesting stories to tell, from the effort to bring back the wooly mammoth to the use of garbage to generate energy in Rizhao, China. 

In his new book, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, Daniel Sherrell reflects on his career as a climate activist and tries to process the emotional fallout, for himself and his generation - Millennials -, of growing up in the age of climate change. Written as a letter to his imagined future child, the book is a kind of Dantean descent into the pit of emotions - from frustration, grief, rage and despair to hope - that all of us who are engaged with what is happening to our planet must grapple with. 

This episode inaugurates our new season on climate change and seems like a good point of departure: coming to terms with how we feel about what Dan Sherrell, referencing philosopher Timothy Morton, calls a hyperobject: a problem too big, spatially and temporally, for us to really wrap our heads around.

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To lobby Congress to include meaningful climate legislation in the Build-Back-Better bill, I encourage you to check out the Sunrise Movement - sunrisemovement.org

This past summer, the UN Secretary General, in connection with the UN report on climate change, spoke of a “code red for humanity,” a warning that was underscored by the fires, floods and searing temperatures we saw worldwide. Now, the Democrats in Congress (most of them, anyway) are fighting to pass the most ambitious climate bill to date and, a month from now, the UN Climate Change Conference, COP26, will convene in Glasgow. So, do we really have any choice but to tackle the #climatecrisis head on? That said, with all the podcasts on climate change, I’m leaving most of the discussions of the science and technology to others. Our concern, as always, is the intersection of culture and nature - in this case, a nature gone awry as a result of our cultural practices. The connection is almost too obvious, and yet, if industrial technologies and capitalist excess led us into this crisis, what can we say about our culture’s ability to respond to the challenges we face?

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In 1923, when British mountaineer George Mallory was asked why he wanted to summit Mount Everest, he famously answered “Because it’s there.” These days, there are still many who want to climb Mount Everest, but the conditions of mountaineering have altered significantly:  people are outraged by the trash on Mount Everest; concerned about the risks incurred by the Sherpa; worried about environmental degradation and indigenous rights, as in the case of Uluru in Australia, which is now closed to climbers; and, last year, the Himalaya were closed to climbers due to Covid 19. All of this complicates the age-old question, “Why do it?” 

My guest, the environmental philosopher Margret Grebowicz, argues in her latest book, Mountains and Desire, that mountaineering is a kind of test case for the challenge of knowing what desire really is in our late-capitalist era when the things we love to do are so often appropriated by everything from advertising to popular culture and social media.

For a list of suggested documentaries on climbing see in-the-weeds.net
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Entomologist Doug Tallamy and I discuss his new book, The Nature of Oaks, in which he pulls back the curtain on the fascinating world of living creatures that inhabit oak trees. From acorn weevils to spun glass caterpillars, the book introduces us to a cast of unusual characters, many of them insects. Tallamy and I discuss these characters, how to best plant oaks (pssst! plant acorns) as well as other engaging and useful oak facts. To listen to my earlier interviews with Doug Tallamy, you can click here for my interview on Bringing Nature Home and here for my episode on Nature’s Best Hope.

For images and links that supplement this episode see https://in-the-weeds.net/podcast/oaks-with-doug-tallamy/
To reach out to me with ideas, suggestions, pitches, etc. email me at [email protected].

In our fourth episode on the forest in fiction, I speak to Philip Weinstein, Professor Emeritus of Swarthmore College and author of numerous books on fiction, including What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison, about the forest and the natural world in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. In this gripping story by the Nobel-prize winning author, the forest plays numerous roles, including that of a place of refuge - notably during Sethe’s escape from slavery -, a place exempt from institutional pressures, and a place that remembers a pre-European past and connects former slaves to an America future.

To learn more about the history of American slavery, listen to Slate's podcast with Jamelle Bouie and Rebecca Onion.

For more about In the Weeds, go to our website in-the-weeds.net.

In our third episode on the forests of the Western imagination, I discuss A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Randall Martin, Professor of English at the University of New Brunswick and author of Shakespeare & Ecology. 

Associated with the night, with dreams, the imagination, madness, and the theater itself, the forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream - inhabited by fairies who delight in playing pranks on the Athenians who enter it - is not merely a passive backdrop but, rather, a potent realm that challenges many of the traditional categories of Western culture, including the distinction between humans and other living beings. 

Randall Martin tells us about the actual forests of Shakespeare’s time and the emerging ecological problems of Early Modern England, which sound surprisingly familiar. Shakespeare, he tells us, has a “fantastic ability to mirror back to us our most recent ideas and concerns and emotions,” and, indeed, A Midsummer Night’s Dream turns up a whole host of environmental concerns that haunt us today, from climate change to worries about genetic engineering to invasive species.

For links and further information see https://in-the-weeds.net/podcast/the-forest-of-shakespeares-a-midsummer-nights-dream-with-randall-martin/

In the second episode of our series on the forest in fiction, Ellen Handler Spitz - a renowned specialist of psychology and the arts and senior lecturer in the Humaninties program at Yale - and I discuss Sondheim and Lapine’s musical, Into the Woods. 

Into the Woods brings together characters and story lines from several well-known fairy tales, drawing particularly on the Brothers Grimm’s versions, and explores the moral repercussions of the characters’ actions in a second act that begins “Once upon a time… later.” 

In his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim likens the woods of fairy tales to the unconscious. Spitz gives us a new version of this analogy, arguing that in Into the Woods, the woods function as “the province of and” where the choices we have to make in real life are suspended; where you “can meet a wolf, or a witch, a giant, a spell or a prince,” which may cause you to change or to learn something new. 

But there is no easy resolution in Sondheim and Lapine’s musical. As Red Riding Hood reflects, after having survived her encounter with the wolf, “isn’t it nice to know a lot!…. and a little bit not.”

If you’ve never seen Into the Woods, I encourage you to watch the stage production before you listen to this episode. A big thank you to Stephanie Kovacs Cohen and Adam David Cohen from Arc Stages who allowed me to use audio excerpts from their wonderful 2104 production of Into the Woods in this episode. You can watch their production in its entirety here.

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If you hear a story that begins “in a dark wood,” you’re instantly transported to a place of fear, of danger and disorientation. Where does this come from? One important, early source is Dante’s Inferno. In the first of our series on fictional forests, Peter Olson and I discuss the two principal forests of the Inferno, the “dark wood” of the opening, where the pilgrim is lost, and the “brooding wood” of Canto XIII, in which those who committed suicide have been transformed into bushes and trees which can speak and bleed. Peter Olson, the Provost of North Central Michigan College, has a Ph.D. in Comparative from the University of Michigan and is the former chair of the Department of English at Hillsdale College where he frequently taught Dante. He guides me in a close reading of these two sections of Dante’s famous descent into hell.

For related links see https://in-the-weeds.net/podcast/the-forests-of-dantes-inferno/

Whenever we enter a fictional forest - whether in a film, a novel or a fairy tale - we know we’re bound for a story of adventure, possibly of danger, magic or transformation. 

In the next few episodes of In the Weeds, we’ll be exploring works of fiction in which the forest plays a key role. Underlying our discussions will be some broader questions: why is the forest such an evocative place in our stories? What does it stand for? And what does the imagined forest tell us about our relationship with actual forests, past and present? 

In this brief introduction to the series, I tell you about some of the works we’ll be discussing - in case you would like to read along - and briefly discuss the two words at the heart of this inquiry, “forest” and “wood.”