The current issue of Orion, one of my favorite magazines, features “World Without Violets,” a scary little essay by Robert Michael Pyle.
A mother in Britain discovered that the editors of the current Oxford Junior Dictionary, in their zeal to bring this little dictionary for children up to date, had removed a long list of words dealing with nature in order to make room for words like “broadband,” “bungee jumping” and “chat room.”
Pyle writes about the universe the editors of the Dictionary have created for the current generation of children who would use it:
It is a world without violets. Spring comes unannounced by catkins and proceeds without benefit of crocuses, cowslips, or tulips. Summer brings no lavender, melons, or nectarines, and autumn is absent of acorns, almonds, and hazelnuts. Winter must be endured without the holly and the ivy, the wren or the mistletoe.
So, suddenly bungee jumping–how retro-80s is that concept?–is more important than tulips, broadband more necessary for children to know about than melons, and chat rooms more of our real world than holly.
If someone decides that we don’t need a word for something, does that something cease to exist? Not really. But what kind of mindset decides that children don’t need to know about their natural world anymore? I was disturbed.
July 13 2009 | Categories: landscape • quotes | Tags: children • natural world • Oxford Junior Dictionary • words | 5 Comments »
Amy Stein’s new book of photographs, Domesticated, sits somewhere between the mundane and poetic, the beautiful and the jarring.
Left: Amy Stein. Howl [ source ]
A coyote howls at the moon in a snow-covered parking lot. A young girl in a bathing suits stands on a swimming pool diving board to confront a black bear staring at her over the fence. A hunter stands in his back yard as he aims his rifle at a wild turkey passing just a few feet away.
The little fleeting vignettes of life in a small Pennsylvania town illuminate life at the boundaries where the back yard ends and something you might call the natural world begins. Sometimes the close proximity of nature makes things amazingly convenient (the hunter and the turkey). Other times it comes too close for comfort (the girl and the bear).
Left: Amy Stein. Backyard [ source ]
These slices of life at first amaze you with that “Wasn’t it amazing that she was able to be right there at the right time to take that photograph” reaction. But the photographer’s working method tricks you a bit. She collected newspaper pieces and oral stories of life in and around Matamoras, a town bordering state forest in the northeast part of the state. Next she proceeded to recreate the events in the stories using town residents and whatever props necessary–including taxidermied animals.
Stein calls her images natural history dioramas, and that’s exactly how they function. But with these scenes taking place inside the edges of a photograph, they seem to have a higher sense of reality to them than the dust-covered tableaux you’d find at your local museum. Picasso said famously that art is a lie that tells the truth. Even though you know that these images are staged, they speak to a deeper knowledge that we know is true.
It’s fascinating, worthwhile work.
Check out Amy Stein’s website, portfolio of the other Domesticated images, or get the book.
December 07 2008 | Categories: art • photography • places | Tags: Amy Stein • domesticated • humans and nature • natural world | 1 Comment »
Earlier I posted a couple of my tourist pictures of Idaho’s Shoshone Falls, the “Niagara of the West.” I’ve just begun to scan and print the negatives of the large-format work from the trip. Here are three from the falls:
Viewpoint at Shoshone Falls, Snake River, Idaho:
Shoshone Falls Park:
Parking Lot at Shoshone Falls Park:
Interestingly, in the pile of newspapers John had saved for me from while I was away, was a book review in the L.A. Times of Ginger Strand’s Inventing Niagara. Interestingly too, in browsing for the book on the web I noticed that it has two different subtitles: “Beauty, Power and Lies,” as well as the more provocative “How Industry, Commerce and Art Conspire to Sell (Out) a Natural Wonder.”
I’d lamented that the Niagara of the West had been despoiled and exploited to an unseemly theme-parkness, and in this long quote in the review Strand has similar things to say about the Niagara of the East:
Manicured, repaired, landscaped and artificailly lit, dangerous overhangs dynamited off and water flow managed to suit the tourist schedule, the Falls are more a monument to man’s meddling than to nature’s strength. In fact, they are a study in self-delusion: we visit them to encounter something real, then observe them through fake Indian tales, audio tours and IMAX films… We hold them up as an example of unconquerable nature even as we applaud the daredevil’s and power-brokers who conquer them. And we congratulate ourselves for preserving nature’s beauty in an ecosystem that, beneath its shimmering emerald surface, reflects our own ugly ability to destroy. On every level, Niagara Falls is a monument to the ways America falsifies its relationship to nature, reshaping its contours, redirecting its force, claiming to submit to its will while imposing our own on it.
Reviewer Tim Rutter, as much as he likes a lot of what Strand has to say, ends up finding the writing of the book to be tiring and frustrating. In that most post-modern technique now turning into cliche, the author’s process of writing the book plays a starring role in the book. When well done it can still be interesting, but in this example Rutter didn’t think that it was. Take that pronouncement under advisement, but it still sounds like the book is a worthwhile read.
June 16 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • places • quotes • rambles | Tags: human effects • natural world • Niagara Falls • parks • Shoshone Falls | 2 Comments »
Are gardeners more humble people? Do we know things a lot of others don’t or believe in things others choose not to believe? Here are a couple thoughts for Earth Day, the first one a soft feather bed of a quote, the second one a bed of nails.
Human beings–any one of us, and our species as a whole–are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of night sky.–Bill McKibben in an interview with Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 13.
If wildlife species are to become extinct, that will be regrettable. But any literate person knows that extinction is the way of evolution, and is in the fundamental flow of life. However, man is different. If man is not immortal, then there is no purpose or meaning in his existence. Which in turn would mean no purpose or meaning in the universe. The human immortality imperative is absolute and radical. That is why wildlife conservation has never been permitted to move to the questions of ultimate value. There is no place for an ultimate nonhuman value in our western metaphysics, because of necessity, the human interest is the cosmic interest. That is what it is all about. Wildlife is an “externality.” — John. A. Livingston in The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, in The John A. Livingston Reader (2007: 101).
April 22 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: Bill McKibben • ecology • evolution • John A. Livingston • natural world • why people garden | 1 Comment »
