Copyright © 2009 by the Union of Concerned Scientists. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Union of Concerned Scientists, Two Brattle Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02238. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thoreau’s legacy : American stories about global warming / Richard Hayes, editor ; foreword by Barbara Kingsolver.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-938987-06-2 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-938987-06-2 (hardcover)
1. Global warming—Anecdotes. 2. Philosophy of nature. 3. Human ecology.
4. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817–1862. I. Hayes, Richard, 1968-
QC981.8.G56T54 2009
363.738´74—dc22 2009020646
The views expressed in this volume are those of the individual authors.
Printed on recycled paper with 30% post-consumer waste, using vegetable-
based inks.
Book design by Sabrina Bowers of Penguin Classics. Portland Tram photo © 2009 Gary Braasch. Daniel T. Blumstein photo courtesy of UCLA. Randall Curren photo courtesy of Glenna Curren.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Forward - Day Seventy-nine
Introduction
I - Treasured Places, Shifting Seasons
The Warming of Walden
Skinny-Dipping at Walden
Black Spring
Rural Southern Georgia
God's Glorious Gifts
A Grandfathers Tale
Last Winter
Sugar Shacks, Snow Cones, and Sugar Maples
II - Water and Ice
The Unfathomable in Flux
For the Love of Alaskan Ice
Through a Sailor's Eyes
Chuckchi Sea Ice-Out
Climate Change and Creature Comforts
Calving Tidewater Glacier
In Defense of Ice
Disappearing Coral
Change Is in the Air
Garden of Ghosts
Clamming
III - Open Spaces
A Million and a Half Acres
An Appalachian Idyll
The Carson Range
Bloomington Canyon
Prairie Pothole Wonder
One Acre at a Time
Steel Creek
The Lying Sky
The Price of Detachment
I Was Born on Shaky Ground
Racetrack Playa
Windmills, Talking
IV - Tales from Urban America
At the Sign of the Heron, Turn Left
Reverse Migration
Oracle
The Heat is Always On
Apathy in the City
Above Portland
The Big Uneasy
Canceling Catalogs
I Love Muscle Cars
V - On Wildlife
Sea Bear
Tiny Scales
American Ruby-Spot Damselfly
The Last Pika
Where Are the Butterflies?
A Chambered Nautilus
Salmon in Alaska
Dolphins in the Water off California
A Beautiful Shrimp
VI - Faith and Convictions
The Golden Rule
Nez Residence, To'sido, New Mexico
Dumpster Diving: My Day of Saving 66 Million BTUs
The Energy of Creation
The Other Part of the Equation
Monetary Capital, Biological Treasure
Peddling Solutions to Climate Change
Counting Cranes
View from the Yakama Nation
Stewards of the Earth
VII - For Tomorrow
A Teachable Moment
The Burns Homestead
One Professor in a Classroom
Passing It On
The Last of the Carnivores
My Grandson
Eating Healthy for the Planet
Man Freezes Out Family
Acknowledgments
Foreword:
Day Seventy-nine
Barbara Kingsolver
WE FIND OURSELVES IN A CHAPTER OF HISTORY I would entitle “Isolation and Efficiency, and How They Came Around to Bite Us in the Backside.” We’re ravaged by disagreements, bizarrely globalized, with the extravagant excesses of one culture washing up as famine or flood on the shores of another. Even the architecture of our planet—climate, oceans, migratory paths, things we believed were independent of human affairs—is collapsing under the weight of our efficient productivity. Twenty years ago, climate scientists first told Congress that carbon emissions were building toward a disastrous instability. Congress said, We need to think about that. Ten years later, the world’s nations wrote the Kyoto Protocol, a set of legally binding controls on our carbon emissions. The United States said, We still need to think about it. Now we watch as glaciers disappear, the lights of biodiversity go out, the oceans reverse their ancient order. A few degrees look so small on the thermometer. We are so good at measuring things and declaring them under control. How could our weather turn murderous, pummel our coasts, push new diseases like dengue fever onto our doorstep? It’s an emergency on a scale we’ve never known, and we’ve responded by following the rules we know: efficiency, isolation. We can’t slow productivity and consumption—that’s unthinkable. Can’t we just go home and put a really big lock on the door?
Not this time. Our paradigm has met its match. Now we can either shift away from a carbon-based economy or find another place to live. Imagine it: we raised our children on a lie. We gave them this world and promised they could keep it running on a fossil substance—dinosaur slime—and it’s running out. The geologists disagree only on how much is left, and the climate scientists now say they’re sorry, but that’s not even the point: we won’t have time to use it all. To stabilize the floods and firestorms, we’ll have to reduce our carbon emissions by 80 percent within a few decades.
We’re still stuck on a strategy of bait and switch: okay, we’ll keep the cars but run them on ethanol made from corn! But … we use petroleum to grow the corn. Even if you like the idea of robbing the food bank to fill the tank, there is a math problem: it takes nearly a gallon (or more, by some accounts) of fossil fuel to render an equivalent gallon of corn gas. Think of Jules Verne’s novel in which the hero is racing Around the World in Eighty Days and finds himself, on day seventy-nine, stranded in mid-Atlantic on a steamship that has run out of coal. Phileas Fogg convinces the captain to pull up the decks and throw them into the boiler. “On the next day the masts, rafts, and spars were burned. The crew worked lustily, keeping up the fires. There was a perfect rage for demolition.” The captain remarked, “Fogg, you’ve got something of the Yankee about you.” Oh, novelists. They always manage to have the last word, even when they’re dead.
How can we get from here to there without burning up our ship? That must be our central task now: to escape the wild rumpus of carbon-fuel dependency in the nick of time. We must make rules that were previously unthinkable, imposing limits on what we use and possess. We must radically reconsider the power relationship between humans and our habitat. In the words of my esteemed colleague and friend Wendell Berry, the new Emancipation Proclamation will not be for a specific race or species, but for life itself. We Americans are the 5 percent of humans who have made around 30 percent of all the greenhouse gases emitted since 1750. But our government has been reluctant to address the issue, for one reason: it might hurt our economy. For a lot of history, many nations said exactly the sam
e thing about abolishing slavery: We can’t grant humanity to all people—it would hurt our cotton plantations, our sugar crop, our balance of trade. Until the daughters and sons of a new wisdom declared: We have to find another way. Enough of this shame.
Have we lost that kind of courage? Have we let economic growth become our undisputed master again? As we track the unfolding disruption of natural and global stabilities, young peopleare told to buy into business as usual: you need a job. Do what we did, preserve a profitable climate for manufacture and consumption at any cost. Even at the cost of the other climate, the one that was hospitable to life as we knew it.
In the awful moment when someone demands at gunpoint, “Your money or your life,” the answer is not supposed to be difficult. And in fact a lot of people are rethinking the money answer, looking behind the cash price to see what it costs us to mine and manufacture, to transport, to burn, to bury. What did it harm on its way here? Could I get it closer to home? In previous generations we rarely asked about the hidden costs; we put them on layaway. But the bill has come due. Some European countries are calculating the “climate cost” of consumer goods and adding it to the price. We’re examining the moralities of possession, inventing renewable technologies, recovering sustainable food systems. We’re even warming up to the idea that the wealthy nations have to help the poorer ones, for the sake of a reconstructed world. Generosity will grind some gears in the machine of Efficiency, but we can retool.
The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. Each time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules and those who said, “We already did. We have made the world new.” The hardest part will be to convince ourselves of the possibilities and hang on. If we run out of hope at the end of the day, we’ll rise in the morning and put it on again with our shoes. Hope is the only reason we won’t burn what’s left of the ship and go down with it. If somebody says, “Your money or your life,” you can say, “Life.” And mean it.
Introduction
Elda Rotor and Kevin Knobloch
IN THE FALL OF 2008, PENGUIN CLASSICS AND THE Union of Concerned Scientists, with the help of hundreds of bookstores across the country, called for interested citizens to submit their personal stories about global warming for a new anthology. The response to our call was overwhelming, making clear how global warming is affecting people’s lives and the places they cherish, as well as the steps they are taking to address the problem.
The essays we selected represent a variety of perspectives, voices, and experiences. The writers include scientists, students, grandparents, activists, veterans, journalists, evangelical Christians, artists, and businesspeople. Their muses are as diverse as their backgrounds.
The chapters are loosely organized by theme. After this introduction, we decided to let the authors’ words speak for themselves. We thought it fitting that the first two essays pay tribute to the namesake of this volume, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was a writer of uncommon power and a keen observer and recorder of his environment; he seemed to us to be an appropriate figure to represent a partnership between a science-based nonprofit organization and a publisher of literary classics, for he was, in a sense, a kind of literary scientist.
More than 150 years after the publication of Walden, Thoreau still calls us to meditate on our own lives and to pay close attention to the natural world and what we can learn from it. In Walden and his other works, Thoreau inspired a long line of great American environmental champions and writers, such as John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson, who introduced readers to landscapes and their indigenous inhabitants—creatures with as much heroism, villainy, grace, and beauty as the great human characters of classic literature. There are too many outstanding works to note here, but we each have our favorites. For Elda it is Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind, with its breathtaking and scenic, humble and majestic observations of the natural world of the air, the land, and the oceans. For Kevin it is Don Schueler’s A Handmade Wilderness, a moving account of two friends who buy a worn-out piece of land in Mississippi and restore it to beauty, health, and usefulness.
There may be no better current example of Thoreau’s legacy than Barbara Kingsolver. Every sentence she writes crackles with energy, and her foreword to this collection is a powerful call to actively combat climate change. Indeed, the science shows that we need to act now if we are to have any hope of stopping the worst consequences of global warming.
Our organizations are proud to bring you this exceptional group of thoughtful and inspiring personal stories about global warming. The authors follow in the long tradition of American environmental writers who have broadened our awareness and sharpened our perspective about the world we share.
They are Thoreau’s legacy.
Elda Rotor
Editorial Director
Penguin Classics
Kevin Knobloch
President
Union of Concerned Scientists
The Warming
of Walden
Michelle Nijhuis
I KNEW CLIMATE CHANGE HAD NO BOUNDARIES; AS a science journalist, I’d seen the fingerprints of global warming in Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks and in the highest peaks of the Rocky Mountains. Even so, I didn’t expect to see its effects on the shores of Walden Pond.
One early spring day not long ago, I accompanied the Boston University biologists Abe Miller-Rushing and Richard Primack as they followed Henry Thoreau through the historic sites of Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau, it turns out, was more than a prolific author, determined iconoclast, and legendary cheapskate: he was also an avid amateur botanist who walked miles in pursuit of the earliest blossoms, collecting specimens in his dilapidated straw hat. “I have the habit of attention to such excess,” he once complained, “that my senses get no rest, but suffer from a constant strain.”
With Thoreau’s detailed botanical records in hand, Miller-Rushing and Primack retraced the philosopher’s steps, noting how flowering times have changed since Thoreau roamed the woods a century and a half ago. They took me botanizing through the crowds of tourists at Walden Pond, on the train tracks near the site of Thoreau’s cabin, and even on the grassy slopes near his grave.
The scientists told me that, on average, spring flowers in Concord were blooming a full seven days earlier than in the 1850s and that their statistics showed a clear and close relationship between earlier flowering times and rising winter and spring temperatures. Thanks to Thoreau’s obsessive data collection—and their own efforts to decipher his crabbed handwriting and match his exploits in the field—they’d found that climate change had touched even the mythic American landscape of Concord.
Their discovery doesn’t cast much light on the path ahead. “Now that we know what’s changing, what are we going to do about it, and what are species going to do on their own about it?” reflected Miller-Rushing. “Those are unanswered questions.” But their work does show how deeply climate change has already penetrated our back yards—and how citizens, from the noted to the obscure, can help track its effects.
Primack and Miller-Rushing are still digging for data in unlikely places. They’ve collected the records of modern-day amateur naturalists and used them to study changes in bird migrations along the East Coast. They recently heard that the owner of Polly’s Pancake Parlor in New Hampshire has a three-decade-long record of the timing of fall foliage in the White Mountains. Bit by bit, scribble by scribble, they and their collaborators—living and dead—are assembling a picture of the past and the unsettling future. With each new finding, their most famous associate seems more prescient than ever: “My expectation ripens to discovery,” Thoreau wrote in his journal in 1856. “I am prepared for strange things.”
Michelle Nijhuis is an award-winning science journalist and former biologist. She lives off the electrical grid in rural western Colorado with her husband and daughter.
Melissa M. Juchniewicz
FOR MOST AMERICANS, HENRY DAVID THOREAU IS A clear but distant voice. But growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, I had a very different perspective of my ancestral townsman. I picked blueberries in the same woods as Thoreau, wandered the same meadows, played in the same sweet, spring-fed waters of Walden and its sister, White Pond.
About a hundred years after Walden was written, Walden Pond had a public swimming beach with a snack bar and, across the street, a trailer park. On the shores of White Pond, which is connected to Walden by deep underground springs, were summer camps; some, like my family’s, were winterized and lived in year-round. My neighborhood was on the wrong side of the tracks, although I delighted in hearing the train whistle and running to those tracks to wave to the conductor.
That whistle was one of my favorite sounds. The other was the frogs. I went to sleep on summer nights to the deafening music of the bullfrogs. In April I strained to hear the early peepers, signaling spring. The tree frogs’ songs were so unique, I felt that no one else in the world knew them as I did.
My best memories are of the woods and ponds. Walking the paths around the ponds, I would stop every few steps to look closely at a dragonfly, a fish, or a frog. The frogs were invisible until they blinked or hopped into the water, and they didn’t mind being petted between the eyes or held cupped in my hands for a closer look. When I was a teenager, my high-spirited friends and I would respond to spring fever by skipping school and following the paths to Walden. There we had the world to ourselves as we skinny-dipped and sunned on the rocks on the north side of the pond, across from the pile of rocks marking the spot where Thoreau had built his cabin. We heard the train on its way to Boston, the wind in the leaves, and the frogs.
Years later, when I visited my mother at White Pond, I was stunned by the silence. In that whole summer night, I didn’t hear a single frog. I miss my private world of woods, meadows, and ponds, which are now something of a theme park for those interested in Concord’s history. I don’t begrudge sharing my hometown with others, but when I learned what had happened to my frogs, I was horrified.
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