A Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson

A Sense of Wonder is a movie made from a drama which is really a monologue by Rachel Carson [an actress playing her very well indeed] during the last year of her life. The film was shot at her house in Maine and at her home in Silver Springs, Maryland. It was a moving, meditative piece. The sound track was only birdsong and the adagio movement of Beethoven's ethereal Violin concerto, one of Carson's [and my] favorite pieces of music.

This was shown in the documentary film class I'm taking. It was preceded by a boringly didactic little filmed lecture about "stuff" from an ecological point of view. Both were preaching to the converted; the discussion afterwards was simply a lot of statements about what we all know about global warming, Carson's success and the miserable state of the world today. Even the Gaia theory was espoused by a woman I had thought was a sensible soul. Actually I understand the appeal of the Gaia theory but I do not see, as this woman did, that events like earthquakes, tsunami, avalanches prove it -- we happen to know more about how many catastrophies are happening because of the relentless news media which loves disasters of all kinds. I certainly see the world as one large system but not as one with intent or purpose.

As I just read in a Scientific American magazine this morning, [and have often read] we have a brain that makes patterns, it has contributed greatly to our survival but we also make mad, runaway patterns, seeing purpose in the sets of events and conspiracies in coincidences and comforting intent in serendipitous instances. I was happy to hear a room full of my contemporaries who are fairly well informed about these matters. I'm afraid, like me, they are incompletely informed and are a little too complacent about their being "are of the solution" when they refuse to buy water in plastic throw away bottles.

A day for the birds

It's a day for the birds -- I knew that before I got out of bed this morning. When WQXR came on a little before 6:00 as usual, as soon as the music ended, there was bird song. The morning announcer explained that he bikes from Brooklyn to work, leaving about 4 a.m. and each morning he hears a lot of birdsong -- that pre-dawn chorus that I've heard and, in fact, heard the weekend I was in Cape Cod early this month. One bird is very loud so the guy recorded ten minutes of it's song. What it sings is so various -- including a bit of car alarm -- that he's sure it is a mocking bird. In the next half hour he played other bits of bird song.

In today's NY Times is an editorial by Verlan Klingenborg about birds -- many common birds that people take for granted, like the whipporwill [or bobolink] that I used to hear very often when I was a kid on a farm, are declining rapidly. The Audobon Society says some by as much as 60%. They may still number in millions but many fewer millions. Verlan mentions the carrier pigeon that used to be so numerous it's massed flights blackened the skies. It was entirely brought to extinction by human beings. There are no carrier pigeons today.

Everyone knows about the great concern that arises for the last 50 condors or the last 30 someting else ... but we can't seem to care about destroying habitat or killing species because of pesticide use until the numbers are so small we can then cry, alas! This is terrible. Birds seem especially vulnerable - in a general way most people like birds, yet few people pay attention to them. People wander through parks in cities with iPods playing in their ears. Or they ignore birds, flowers, trees and everything else as they chatter away on their cell phones. As if we do not live in the natural world, as if the natural world is just so much weather to dress appropriately for. Not as if we are all living beings together sharing the weather and the trees and the sun and wind and clouds. If I asked everyone sharing a subway car with me as I go to work, "when did you last listen to birdsong?" most would have a hard time answering. They certainly do not share with that morning broadcaster the wonder of that burst of birdsong that happens pre-dawn.

Consider the Odds

I was surfing the Artful Quilters Web Ring and read Tall Girl's blog which is listed quite near mine [I'm now 160 - things get changed every so often, i was 181]. She wrote on Earth Day that she felt she was doing all she could to reclycle and be eco-aware but then read an article saying that the cords to all our electronics emit carbon and should be unplugged when not in use, including TVs and such. I tired to leave a comment when AOL seized up as it tempramentally. But since this is a peeve of mine, I'm writing about it.

The media are very good at scare tactics, pretty good at reporting odd staistics and lousy at putting most things into context. Two examples besides Tall Girl's concern occurred today. I went into a deli and heard a young man order an egg white omelet. "What do you want in it?' ask the guy behind the counter. "Nothing, just egg whites." I looked at the slender 30ish guy and thought Why? No one can convince me that egg whites alone taste good. He doesn't need to lose weight, he's probably too young to have serious conerns about heart disease. But he read something saying egg yolks are bad for you. That's why. At work I transcribed a woman journalist talking about anorexia and bulimia, looking for why young women want to be thin and obsess about their weight. The journalist, who is 27, had no historical perspective beyond her mother who is probably 50. and she, feminist that she proclaims herself to be. She had no political perspective at all. She had looked only at media images and the "perfect girl" idea -- but not where it came from, beyond the mother's need to be supermom. She seemed to be a very ingtelligent woman, perhaps in 30 years she'll be able to look at society with a wider lens and wonder why society at this time needs to portray women as stick thin -- boyish of figure. Certainly not Valkuries or Amazons. Look at the arguably most powerful woman in American Sect. of State Rice ... A smart woman, a talented woman [whose politics I dislike] but does she look like someone who can throw her weight around? All 110 pounds of her?

That's my soap box: The well meaning smart young or not so youing media people who glom onto a few statistics, but cannot see beyond, often, their own economic class, almost never beyond the American culture. So all become more and more parochial, and grab onto "facts" which are rarely put into any useful context. Another example: not an hour ago, I heard a health report saying that a new study says that people who eat a lot of flavaoids have 23% less pancreatic cancer. Where can you get flavaoids: Cabbage and spinach is all they said. What's the incidence of panreatic cancer? No information given, who should care about this "information"? It was presented as if we all should, after all they used the big C word. Really -- is this news? Is this really information? How much cabbage did you eat this week?

Let's go back to Tall Girl's concern about all those electical cords in her house. What is the possible carbon emmission, if it's true that there is? How does that compare to the carbon emmission of the power plant that generates her electricity? How does it compare to the haze of Beijing or Los Angeles or even tiny Kathmandu? Does she need to go around unplugging things when not in use, can't she do something truly positive with her time? Can't that guy with the egg whites spend five minutes in the morning actually enjoying his breakfast -- what if he at half a cantaloupe with some cottage cheese? Flavor, protein, calcium, caratinoids and tasty. We have one life to live, we aren't responsible for saving the world, we are responsible to ourselves not to waste the precious life we have.

Global warming --

Too warm today -- March weather is often freaky. It's not possible to dress comfortably, too hot, too cool, no rain gear with it starts pouring ... carrying around a silly umbrella with the sun blazing. On the sidewalks, at the corner Korean delis are buckets of daffodils and bunches of roses all kinds of beautiful colors. Unopened hyacinths look promising and cyclemen are SO beautiful ... some place it's spring ... perhaps only inside long plastic green houses. One cannot believe in nature from what is available for sale. Who knows where all those flowers came from or under what conditions they were grown?

How, for that matter are we to have any solid knowledge about much of anything. Over the weekend I read a about an international panel's report on global warming: It predicted lack of water for large parts of the world, esepcially in Africa and some parts of Asia, much starvation ... within fifty years. This report wasn't given in the US so it got little coverage. Then yesterday's paper had a major, long article saying, pooh-pooh to Al Gore, he's exaggerating. He's not a scientist so we must not believe anything in his movie/book. In other words, relax everyonoe, go on worrying about the stock market but don't forget to keep on shopping ... using up whatever resources you can afford, gas, electric, all that stuff in the supermarkets, and malls. Go to keep the GNP churning.

Maybe the earth has undergone such warming cycles before; but it can't be denied that there has never been so many people on the earth, all needing food and water and reasonably clean air. That alone changes how we can think about what is happening. Also never before have so many forests and jungles been cleared, never have so many emissions gone into the atomsphere. Doesn't anybody feel any responsibility? Well, apparently not. While one group of theoretical scientists are muttering about possibly never being able to understand dark matter or dark energy [since they haven't quite figured out what gravity is yet], the wo/man in the street, like me today, just fusses that it's not possible to dress comfortably in this changing weather. No, there's no moral to this story ... except that we have such small thoughts, small concerns. Can't we just maybe a minute or two a day think about the bigger world ... we earthlngs may be alone in the universe but as individuals we are far from alone on this one small planet.