“Altostratus may look more extensive toward the horizon than overhead, but the apparent compression of cloud cover toward the horizon may be more a function of perspective than of a real increase in clouds” (David Ludlum, Field Guide to North American Weather, 456). Chicago, mid-October 2021.
Winter isn’t here yet, but the weather in Chicago is showing real signs of its existence. Nights below freezing; unforeseen bursts of snow; and the most characteristic of all: dull, uniform overcast skies, which appear featureless from the ground.
Looking at clouds is usually associated with boredom, but I would argue that one’s boredom is better assessed by what kind of clouds you are looking at.
One of the things I miss during the colder months are the complex cloudscapes. Not that these can’t appear in winter; if you see something like the picture above in January, you should pay attention and savor it, for it’s less likely to happen the next day. This is because there is simply less heat thrown into the atmosphere in winter, and heat is the scarce ingredient that churns with the more plentiful cool air. These thermal fault lines in the sky are the cause of the most interesting clouds.
And clouds, in keeping with their reputation for the ephemeral, are at their most interesting when the air is moving, and when their formations are short-lived, a transitional state.
“Altocumulus clouds produce the most dramatic and beautiful cloudscapes, especially in the rays of a low sun.” (Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloud Collector’s Handbook, 18). Chicago, early November 2021.
Sources
David Ludlum, The National Audobon Society Field Guide to North American Weather. Knopf, 1991.
Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloud Collector’s Handbook. Chronicle Books, 2011.
I live in a very walkable neighborhood in Chicago, and have walked almost everywhere I need to go daily for more than a decade. I’ve been thinking more about the meaning of all this walking in the last few years, mostly by building a reading list on the topic and informally going through it. One of the best I’ve read is Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking.
The book came out more than twenty years ago, in 2000, but I see no evidence that advances in technology or changes in society have dated it. Walking has had the status of a gratuitously simple, stubbornly un-innovative way of getting around for at least 100 years. Because it is so obvious that walking is behind the times, whenever there is a desire to return to basics, or a burst of nostalgia for simple things–at that point the topic of walking will be due for a revival. I think we had one last year, during the pandemic.
What I have taken from Solnit’s book is that walking is one of those subtle, mostly deniable ways in which people express a disdain for hierarchy, routine and structure. The authorities that offer an alternative to walking–businesses, governments–do it because they think everyone wants to eliminate downtime between the appointed parts of that day; people insist on that time. The walker is neither here nor there, in a liminal state (51), dropped off the official record. Walking remains one of the best ways to disguise doing nothing (5). Walking “connects different interiors” which would otherwise remain unconnected (9). The spaces between, for example, the gym and the workplace, can have meaning if a person is in a position to look at them. And finally, because walking is too ordinary to be interesting, it has no true experts (ix), only amateurs who use it for their own reasons.
Before Halloween recedes even further, one recommendation I have to cram
in:
The collaboration between the artist Leonard Baskin and the poet Richard
Michelson.
I never paid much attention to Baskin’s work, until I came across it
while searching out Halloween books for my son. Many people have seen
the FDR memorial in Washington, D.C., where Baskin contributed a bronze
bas-relief
sculpture
of the president’s coffin being carried by a horse-drawn carriage.
Baskin and Michelson were friends and co-authors on several books for
children, and Michelson helped promote Baskin’s work in an important
art gallery he still owns and runs in
Northampton, Massachusetts. Baskin died in 2000. The
tribute Michelson
wrote at the top of his gallery page for Baskin is worth reading.
Their books are written with a sense of humor, and illustrated in a
style that walks right up to being inappropriately scary for kids.
Still, they remain whimsical, sometimes even ridiculous:
Baskin was mostly an artist for grownups, but his style is a natural fit
for the lighthearted scares of Halloween. Many of the illustrations in
these books are just samples from Baskin\’s longer-running projects. For
example, the “ghoul” in Did You Say Ghosts? appears to be based on a
long study of the raptor
figure:
Copyright Leonard Baskin and Richard Michelson
Michelson’s online
gallery is a
beautiful and careful memorial to his friend, and includes much material
cataloged in several out-of-print books of Baskin’s work. I’d recommend
spending a few minutes there. No website lasts forever, and Michelson’s
is a great one. It’s the kind of site you can get lost in, anything but
distracted.
Copyright Leonard Baskin
Sources
Leonard Baskin and Richard Michelson. Animals That Ought to Be. Simon
& Schuster, 1996.
Leonard Baskin and Richard Michelson. Did You Say Ghosts?. Simon &
Schuster, 1993.
The Honey Locusts outside my front window are turning yellow. These trees can be found on many city streets in Chicago. And they are hardy: lines of them thrive a few feet from the lakefront on the South Side. For most of the year I find them less than attractive; something about their long rows of small leaves give me the impression of a tree-sized weed.
W.J. Bean was more enthusiastic about the species, Gleditsia triacanthos. It’s native to North America, and the Englishman wrote approvingly of the prospect of importing it to the U.K. It has “beautiful fern-like foliage,” he noted, “which turns a clear bright yellow in autumn. (291, Trees and Shrubs, Volume II)”
On this I can agree. The tree is more beautiful when it’s shutting down for the season, cycling through a predictable, cascading bright yellow phase for a final few weeks.
Sources
W.J. Bean and George Taylor, Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles, 8th Edition, Volume II. J. Murray, 1970-1980
I was riveted by this long-form article in the New York Times about the rise of white sharks (aka great white sharks) off the coast of Cape Cod. It may seem like a sensational topic, but that wasn’t how I took it. One has to understand that white sharks were basically unknown in the area until 15-20 years ago. Now they are so numerous during the warm season that, if you know where and how to look, they are everywhere. So the piece is really about how dread creeps onto the surface of a beautiful place, changing how people experience it. Chivers writes that
Risk of attack remains low. But the quantity of large sharks, and fears that have accompanied them, have caused a cultural trauma, reshaping how people experience the ocean and forcing coastal communities into a period of reckoning and adaptation.
I think about fear every day while out in public during this pandemic that is rapidly sliding into status quo. The article discusses what scientists call “fear ecology, a “concept describing the effects predators have on members of a prey species that do not get eaten but whose predator-avoidance strategies carry costs.” That mindset of avoidance, says a doctor who tried unsuccessfully to save a Cape Cod shark attack victim, “hovers over the region: the fear that sharks are going to ruin this idyllic place.”
I don’t avoid some places, people, or situations–bars, for example–because I fear them. It’s more simple than that: I just don’t go to those places. I spare myself the psychic costs of even fear. But what might be worse than fear is forgetting what a place looked like before the fear set in.
John Murphey, "The Perilous Situation of Major Mony, 23
July 1785," Source: Rijksmuseum. Original
(Public Domain).
Craig Whitlock’s new book, The Afganistan
Papers,
is based on a trove of formerly unreleased interviews with hundreds of
U.S. officials who participated in the War in
Afghanistan.
What makes Whitlock’s book so great are its minutia, produced by
interview subjects who were thinking on the fly in spontaneous
conversation, and who didn’t necessarily know that their thoughts would
be made public. Many of these details will likely never find a home in
more synoptic accounts, but they add a fascinating texture to the
broadest accounts so far of the U.S. occupation.
Given recent
events,
the book couldn’t have been better-timed. The early sections cover
important questions about the motivation to stay in Afghanistan after
the fall of the Taliban.
From the first chapter: In the war’s first months, the U.S. troop
presence was kept so small and provisional that there were almost no
facilities of any kind. Whitlock writes that “soldiers who wanted fresh
clothes had to fly their dirty laundry by helicopter to a temporary
support base in neighboring Uzbekistan,” and there were no showers
until around Thanksgiving 2001:
Some of the guys had been there for up to thirty days, so they needed
a bath,” Maj. Jeremy Smith, the quartermaster who oversaw the laundry
unit in Uzbekistan, said in an Army oral-history interview. His
superiors didn’t want to send any extra personnel or equipment to
Bagram but finally relented.
“Eventually they said, ‘Okay, let’s go ahead and do this,‘ ” Smith
recalled. “But it was, ‘We’re not sure how long we’re going to be
here, we’re not sure about a whole lot of things, so our presence here
is going to be as small as possible. How few people can you send?’ The
smallest number I could send was two. ‘What’s the smallest shower
configuration you can send?’ ‘Well, it’s designed for twelve, but the
smallest we can realistically send is a six-head shower unit.’ The
mixer and the boiler and the pumps were all designed for a twelve-head
shower, so a twelve-head shower only going through six heads had some
really good water pressure. Everybody liked that.”
Over time, Bagram would balloon in size to become one of the largest
U.S. military bases overseas. When Smith returned to Bagram a decade
later for a second tour of duty, he was greeted by a fully functioning
city with a shopping mall, a Harley-Davidson dealer and about 30,000
troops, civilians and contractors. “Even before the plane stopped,”
Smith said, “I instantly recognized the mountains and after that I
noticed it was the same smell. Then getting off, it was like, ‘Holy
cow! I don’t recognize hardly anything.‘ ”0{#ffn2 .footnote}^
It’s a great anecdote about the initial U.S. reluctance to create the
smallest roots of a permanent base. That first shower stall wasn’t a
meaningful investment in any material sense, but it said something about
the U.S. status as an occupier, more than all the showers that would be
built in the years after.
But even the eventual sunk costs of the war effort–the massive
facilities and aid that marked the long-term occupation–do not add up
to any kind of explanation for why the U.S. stayed so long. This year’s
pullout showed that the U.S. has no
problem
leaving an expensive footprint behind.
The little stuff just makes it easier to get through the next day and
week, to be slightly more comfortable with not making a decision about
whether to leave. The act of building a facility gave the occupiers a
task to avoid boredom, so that they did not ask harder questions to
their superiors about why they were there, and so that, when nothing
else was happening on the ground, they could wait for what’s next. If
the war planners only allowed amenities like laundry and showers with
great reluctance, it says a lot about warding off a symbolically
troubling frame of mind for the war effort: construction, maintenance,
strategy, planning, etc. Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers documents
how this worry plagued the leadership, long after the people on the
ground had started wondering about, and improvising, these very things.
Later on in the same chapter, on broader motivations for the occupation:
The Bush administration was still leery of getting bogged down. But
the swift and decisive military victories boosted U.S. officials’
confidence and they tacked on new goals.
Stephen Hadley, the White House’s deputy national security adviser at
the time, said the war shifted into “an ideological phase” in which
the United States decided to introduce freedom and democracy to
Afghanistan as an alternative to terrorism. To make that happen, U.S.
troops needed to prolong their stay.
“We originally said that we don’t do nation-building but there is no
way to ensure that al-Qaeda won’t come back without it,” Hadley said
in a Lessons Learned interview. “ [We] did not want to become
occupiers or to overwhelm the Afghans. But once the Taliban was
flushed, we did not want to throw that progress away.”
By the time Bush gave his speech to the Virginia Military Institute
cadets in April 2002, he had settled on a much more ambitious set of
objectives for the war. The United States, he said, was obligated to
help Afghanistan build a country free of terrorism, with a stable
government, a new national army and an education system for boys and
girls alike. “True peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan
people the means to achieve their own aspirations,” he
added.0{#ffn3 .footnote}^
When it came to ideological justifications for the war, the doublethink
went down a pathway not entirely dissimilar to the intense ambivalence
about the practicalities of maintaining an on-the-ground force. The
country let itself develop ambitious plans for Afghanistan, but it
needed to avoid the most plausible characterization of those plans. For
example, U.S. officials, including President Bush, were especially
reluctant to call their operation “nation-building:”
After the United States invaded Afghanistan, President George W. Bush
told the American people that they would not get stuck with the burden
and expense of “nation-building.” But that presidential promise,
repeated by his two successors, turned out to be one of the biggest
falsehoods uttered about the war.
Nation-building is exactly what the United States tried to do in
war-battered Afghanistan—and on a colossal scale. Between 2001 and
2020, Washington spent more on nation-building in Afghanistan than in
any country ever, allocating $143 billion for reconstruction, aid
programs and Afghan security forces. Adjusted for inflation, that is
more than the United States spent in Western Europe with the Marshall
Plan after World War II.0{#ffn4 .footnote}^
Justifications for the occupation were tied back to the success of the
invasion, which ended after a few months. The toppling of the Taliban,
which scattered Al-Qaeda, was a lot easier to defend (to a domestic
audience, to the world) as a response to September 11th. Everything that
came after was not. And so the U.S. found itself in a position where
nation-building was both everywhere–because the U.S. was indisputably
doing it–and nowhere, because the very people who were doing
nation-building said that it was indefensible, on grounds both
historical and strategic.
Put these two facets about the Afghan war together–the tiniest
implementation details and grandest arguments–and one comes away with
a situation that was only tolerable so long as it could not be accepted
for what it was, a kind of national exercise in procrastination around
policies and objectives that helps to explain how twenty years could go
by without a plan.
[Whitlock, a journalist, first wrote about these interviews in a
well-received series of
articles
for the Washington Post in 2019. ↩︎]{#fn1}
On Sunday night (August 22nd, 2021), this was the view from the Chicago
South Side, looking southeast over the lake, of the four Galilean moons.
They are easily visible through 10x30 binoculars. From a sketch I made
around midnight:
Colors black/white inverted
What attracted my attention about Callisto’s position is that lies well
outside the apparent plane of the other three moons. I usually
see the visible
Galilean lined up with one another, like we are looking at them edge-on
from Earth, in the same orbital plane.
A quick illustration shows how the configuration in the sketch can
occur. None of the four moons orbits in the exact same plane, although
their inclinations are very close to one another. And the orbital plane
of Jupiter is slightly tilted toward Earth. These factors mean that we
see the orbits of the Gallilean moons at a slight angle to us, like we
are looking at very narrow ellipse rather than single-dimension lines:
Orbital paths of Gallilean moons. Apparent tilt of moons'
orbit relative to Earth is exaggerated for illustration. Actual tilt is
between one and two degrees.
Callisto, the outermost moon, has a much larger orbit than the other
three moons, meaning it travels up and down across the largest distance
in both dimensions (see arrow in illustration), and giving it more
latitude to reach an apparent position “above” or “below” the other
moons, as we see it from Earth.
Berenice Abbott and Pierre Mac-Orlan. Atget, Photographe
de Paris (Paris: H. Jonquières, 1930), pl. 4. Public Domain. Getty
Museum.
The story about the library book returned 100 years overdue is one those
lighthearted newspaper pieces that still gets written
up.
Sometimes these overdue books come with an explanation that makes for a
human interest story, but just as often they are returned anonymously,
left on a doorstep or mailed back without return address or explanation.
When we do find out the reason for the return, it’s usually because
because someone is clearing out
belongings,
and has sentimental attachments that lead them to send the old book
back. The library is still there after all these years, and returning
the book connects a dusty past to a living present. If the book was in
the possession of a dead person, the return might be a kind of act on
their behalf.
An article about the old, returned library book gives the public an
occasion to reflect on a private possession. Still, for the most part,
millions of objects, however interesting and worthy of attention in the
distracted present, will never get that much recognition before they are
sold as junk, stored until they rot, or tossed in the trash. But as long
as those artifacts are on still on paper, they have a claim on
existence, awaiting notice by some later passerby. It’s possible to
return century-old books to the library because they are durable and
resilient in storage. Paper, even if stored in degrading conditions,
lasts a long time.
This is not the case for digital objects, whether text, photos or other
media. The old computer or phone stored in the attic may technically
hold a lot of memories, but formidable barriers exist to its
rediscovery.
First, an attic full of digital stuff comes with major concerns about
material breakdown. I am not aware of any digital storage medium that
does well outside of prolonged room-temperature conditions. And failures
are often invisible. The objects in a digital archive, like CDs, may
look fine to the eye, but one can only be
sure
by using them. You needn’t burn the attic down to lose a lifetime of
memories stored on a hard drive. Just let it sit, and it will almost
certainly fail within a few decades at most.
Second, there are the concerns about the technology itself. Technology
changes fast today, and while certain standards may look the same on the
surface (e.g., the plain text file), more subtle issues like archaic
encoding formats might still render today’s data practically
inaccessible to future computers. If you want to read a file on my
computer a few decades from now, you may need to supply not just an
ancient copy of software to run it–you’ll need to provide the
hardware, too.
The consequence is that very little of the ordinary digital present in
the attic is likely to survive.
And that’s OK. The world is overwhelmed as it is by the information it
creates. And to be fair, very little of the richness of the past has
survived, too. But some of today’s digital world, some nth fractional
sub-unit of all the bits being produced today, likely will make it into
the long future. And like in past eras, the stuff that survives won’t
necessarily be what was deliberately preserved.
Consider this phenomenon in archaeology: there is little trace of most
dwellings in ancient England or Ireland. One guess about why is that
these peoples built their houses with
turf, basically dirt from a bog,
that was quickly reabsorbed into the earth once the houses were
abandoned. These people weren’t thinking about documenting their
lifestyle for posterity–turf was what they had lying around. Compare
this archeological record to that of the cliff dwellers of the U.S.
desert southwest, who also built
with what they had available: clay and mud (adobe brick), which has in
many cases lasted thousands of years. In this sense the cliff-dwellers
got lucky when it comes to the archaeological discoverability–and the
historical record–of their civilization. They lived in a place with
ready-to-hand materials that were made last.
I suspect that what survives of the digital world in the future will be
just as accidental as the objects that archaeologists have already
discovered about past eras. Let’s imagine that the next few decades see
a burst of innovation in the electronic drive storage industry. Many
more storage media exist than we have today, some made with exotic and
rare elements, others with old standby technology, and all with various
trade-offs. Or maybe a few varieties of solid-state drive take advantage
of the atomic properties of some ultra-durable element like iron or
lead. In any case, anyone who happens to have used a certain type of
drive will have created data that lasts for 100,000 years under the
right conditions.
Or, imagine the archival equivalent of the mosquito in amber from the
Cretaceous period, some natural disaster, an asteroid creating a plume
in the desert that buries a cloud data center in an old-school cloud of
dust and rock. One data center might be a tiny fraction of the
information stored on today’s cloud, but still a huge chunk of material
for the archaeologists of the future to pore through with their
paleo-digital forensic tools.
It’s anyone’s guess what will be preserved–and what, if anything, it
will represent to later eons of intelligent life. Ever-more
attention is being given to the
fragile materiality of digital life, but it’s still just as likely that
what does get preserved will endure by accident rather than deliberate
selection. Monks and scribes have saved much of what we have from the
last few thousand years, but who has inherited that calling today?
Perhaps a set of text messages that someone sends this afternoon will
survive a hundred million years after a play by Shakespeare. We can’t
rule it out. A lot can happen in a future that–whether to not people
are around to see it–will last a long time.
This
article
in the New York Times summarizes the recent scientific research on a
problem I wondered about a few months
ago: what happens to animals that
navigate by starlight, when the stars are washed out by the city? As it
turns out, there are many other animals that rely on celestial phenomena
to move about. Dung beetles may walk a straight line by looking at the
trail of the Milky Way. Seals appear to swim with consistency toward
bright star-like objects in the sky.
They also mention the study I discussed previously, about Indigo
Buntings. The birds were taught in artificial conditions to treat the
bright star Betelgeuse as the pole star instead of the current north
star, Polaris. Stephen Emlen, the scientist responsible for the study,
is quoted interpreting the results this way:
This suggested that the bird’s stargazing skills were learned, not
derived from some star map encoded in their genes…In the glittering
dark, each young bunting had apparently spent some time looking up,
studying, as the stars traced circles in the night sky.
If we accept his theory, it suggests that the birds may be clever enough
to deal with the perpetual, gradual change in alignment of the night
sky. They did not evolve with some fixed blueprint of specific stars.
Even better, they were born with a rudimentary awareness of how
celestial rotation works. 26,000 years, the period over which the
Earth’s axis wobbles to point at different stars across the sky, is
enough time for evolution to change an organism, but not that long a
period when compared to the one hundred and fifty million years or
more
over which modern birds evolved from dinosaurs.
Here’s an off-the-cuff definition of animal learning to make sense of
this situation. Learning is what animals do to survive when there is no
time or opportunity to evolve. Animals learn when something about their
environment changes too quickly for selection pressure to make a better
bird, or beetle, or seal. At this point they can either (1) use their
existing biological equipment to make use of the environment they have,
or (2) die out or retreat from the environment that has changed.
Learning and evolution cooperate. Those individuals that learn are more
likely to contribute their genes to the species, thereby increasing the
pool of genes that contribute to learning. This suggests that an
environment that changes quickly is likely to select not for any
particular trait, but for beings that learn to live with change. In
interesting times, only the smart animals survive. In a sense, it’s
another way in which humans are making the world in their own image. If
there is anything that distinguishes Homo sapiens besides the ability
to think, it is the ability to cause environmental change on a different
order of time than the cosmological, geological, or evolutionary
timescales that preceded them. Thinking is fast by nature. Rapid change
gives an advantage to learned adaptation over instinctive fitness. And
when the environment changes really fast, within even the memory of
living Homo sapiens, it may it favor animals who learn, too.
No one decides who gets to be a naturalist. There are no degrees or
governing bodies. The term is distinctive, in that it describes an
activity that is very demanding and absorptive, yet inclusive. A person
is on the way to becoming a naturalist when he, for example, takes
pictures of biological samples in the field and contributes them to an
open population database like
iNaturalist. And the “New Naturalist
Library” series has for 75 years published detailed
surveys by top
scientists, who study the natural world, from climate and
weather
to
butterflies.
These scientists, specialized and rigorous as they are–they call
themselves naturalists, too.
The plant biologist Oliver Rackham writes in the preface to his book
Woodlands:
I was brought up on such classic New Naturalist books as London’s
Natural History by R.S.R. Fitter, Mushrooms and Toadstools by John
Ramsbottom and The Sea Shore by C.M. Yonge. In that tradition I deal
mainly in observations that do not call for specialised equipment and
that any well-motivated observer can make. In this field amateurs can
still do things that professionals, locked into their own ethos and
culture, find difficult. I hope to inspire young readers to lay down
the basis for long-term observations to be repeated in future decades.
Rackham makes no attempt to wall off the naturalist’s calling from the
ordinary public. Quite the opposite, he suggests that the amateur can do
more than participate in naturalistic activities. The amateur can, in
fact, contribute to an activity defined by “observation,” provided
that he is willing to keep at it over the long term.0{#ffn1
.footnote}^
Today the ideal of the naturalist is often integrated with formal
scientific expertise.0{#ffn2 .footnote}^ Getting out in nature
takes time, and scientists are the ones with grants that pay the bills,
university positions with flexible schedules, and a vocational
expectation that includes going out into the field and looking around.
Everyone else is of course not barred from study, but just being out in
nature does not quite make one a naturalist. Then again, there are many
field scientists doing their own specialized work, “locked into their
own ethos and culture,” as Rackham puts it, who are not really engaged
in naturalistic pursuits, either. So what makes a naturalist? Consider
this description, by the biologist Bernd Heinrich, about the process of
taking field notes:
After so many years of making observations, there is hardly a thing I
encounter that does not connect me in one way or another to familiar
ideas or observations. However, I am most interested in the seemingly
anomalous. In taking field notes, the way to find these peculiarities
is to keep track of many observations that may not appear at the time
to be relevant at all. Similar to the way a subtle twist in a blade of
grass may betray the presence of game, a single observation in my
field notes may stand out against a backdrop of sentences standing in
an ordered array. The way that I keep a journal now reflects the
chaotic nature of this type of chase. I cannot afford the luxury of
presorting data. I don’t walk around with a notebook. But I often
carry a piece of folded paper in my shirt or pants pocket, along with
a pencil stub. The information flow as I jog down our driveway and up
our country road may be infinite, and I cannot stop every few feet and
record everything. I simply remember most observations while I jog,
though I may still record mundane things that catch my eye and that
might be useful in identifying something in- teresting. At these times
I’m not trying to solve a problem; instead, I’m open to signs of
one.0{#ffn3 .footnote}^
Heinrich describes an observers’ routine that is honed by trained
scientific curiosity. But the act of observing cannot only serve an
existing scientific agenda. Field notes are not a record of what is
important. They are a minimal record of what rises to the level of being
noticeable, a translation of an “information flow” that is
“infinite” into a set of recoverable mental traces. “I cannot afford
the luxury of presorting data,” he writes. There is no template for the
field observer. The naturalist only sees what he records, and field
notes are the written, recoverable proof that he has not just seen, but
noted too. All his training does not change their mundane character.
Real expertise stands on a continuous, stubborn, unbored openness to
detail.
A consequence of the naturalist’s unflappable commitment to actual
observation is that she avoids two oscillating dangers of the modern
relationship to nature. The naturalist is not a romantic who ascribes
soft spiritual forces to the not-human, who needs to sustain the
illusion of a wild or untouched nature to value it. And the naturalist
is not really a scientific materialist, either, who seeks to dissect
natural processes in terms of physical laws, models and forces. Another
feature of naturalistic observation is that while it requires a total
commitment to detail, there is also a holistic quality to it, a tendency
for the mass of detail to start out as a collection of incongruous parts
but end as a system.
Consider the last book by book by Oliver Rackham, The Ancient Woods of
the Helford River, published after his death from a partially-finished
manuscript. In one chapter he reviews individual patches of woods in a
schematic sketch. Here is how he begins his description of the
Calamansack Wood along the Helford:
A house was built in the wood in 1918. Much of the wood is mown in
August on a two-year cycle. This favours bluebell at the expense of
bramble. Two mowings kill holly, resulting in a characteristic empty
bottom to the wood. This wood is on a steep south-east-facing slope
with a plateau at the top; it is very exposed to the east, except in a
deep narrow ravine down to Pill Cove. In the west are two houses of
the 1930s, one of which is a period piece with its green pantile roof;
their gardens have increased at the expense of the wood. A
foot-holloway zigzags down to the pill, at the mouth of which is an
elegant granite boathouse.0{#ffn4 .footnote}^
Rackham sees no problem with building his naturalistic account on a
description of an old house. To see this wood is to begin with the
outlines of human activity around which it has grown. Neither the human
nor the wood has priority here. He will write of how they grow through
one another.0{#ffn5 .footnote}^ Then, following his own advice,
he steps back further in time:
The wood is clearly divided, and has been for at least two hundred
years, into a coppice on the exposed slopes and a timberwood in the
ravine. The coppice was last felled between 1820 and 1860, apart from
an area c.1930 and a few small patches since. The timber trees appear
to date from the 1770s. The ancient stools are up to 10 ft in
diameter.
Calamansack Wood is a natural process that coexists with a human past.
For Rackham it begins with the first mention in the record, and with the
earliest signs of human activity:
Calamansack Wood is well recorded back to 1249, the longest certain
documented history of any Helford River wood. With Merthen and Gweek,
it is one of the earliest woods in England to be shown on a map. It
has an ancient boundary bank and an internal earthwork corresponding
to a sixteenth-century subdivision (see page 62, Fig. 4.1). There are
at least three charcoal-hearths.
Finally, he ends by speculating on the name of the wood itself:
What did the name Calamansack mean? The 1249 form, Kylmoncote, makes
no sense in Cornish and is evidently a misspelling. Kylmonsek occurs
in 1308 and 1331, Kyllymansak in 1442, and in 1478 we meet a John
Kyllymonsek. The first part of the word is probably kyl ‘corner’;
monsek is a word of unknown meaning with the adjectival ending -ack.
The place-name therefore means ‘Something-y Corner’. By 1442 the name
had been reinterpreted as if it contained kelli, ‘grove’, perhaps
because of the wood. The hamlets of Calamansack Wartha and Wollas were
both in existence at least by 1365 and finally the Kyllymonsek family
was named after them.
I make no claim that Rackham’s account of the Calamansack wood is a
model for the naturalist’s approach to observational practice. A
naturalist gets to invent, in some sense, an idiosyncratic genre of his
own. Rackham’s model is an original synthesis of details which could
have been put to other purposes. But its essence, as he wrote in the
Preface to Woodlands, is being attentive to the factor of time,
being willing to decompress the present as far as the details of the
total environment (ecological, historical) will allow.
[That Rackham calls upon people to observe nature “over the long
term” brings up the related idea of natural history, and its
connection to the naturalist tradition–a worthwhile question for
later. ↩︎]{#fn1}
[The entry for “naturalist” in the OED suggests one definition
close to what I mean: “an amateur concerned more with observation
than with experiment.” This sense appears to have arisen in the
mid-19th century, in parallel with the professionalization of
science. Cf. one OED example from Charles Darwin’s Origin of the
Species, where he writes that “every naturalist knows vaguely what
he means when he speaks of a species.” ↩︎]{#fn2}
[Bernd Heinrich, “Untangling the Bank,” in Field Notes on Science
and Nature (33) ↩︎]{#fn3}
[The following passages are taken from Chapter 7 in Helford Woods,
“Individual Woods,” pp. 107-110. ↩︎]{#fn4}
[In the Forward to Woodlands, he confesses that “I write as a now
rather old-fashioned botanist, concerned with woodland as an
ecosystem with a life of its own, in which human agency is one among
many environmental factors. In this book trees are themselves
wildlife, rather than merely a habitat for wildlife.”
↩︎]{#fn5}
Sources
Bernd Heinrich, “Untangling the Bank.” In Field Notes on Science and
Nature, ed. Michael Canfield. Harvard, 2011
Oliver Rackham, Woodlands. New Naturalist Library (100). Collins,
2010.
Oliver Rackham, The Ancient Woods of The Helford River. Little Toller
Books, 2019.
![[description]](../../img/DSC_0563-large.jpg)
![[description]](../../img/IMG_6705-large.jpg)
![[description]](../../img/DSC_0567-large.jpg)
