Join me for a talk at University of Arizona this Wednesday! I’ll be exploring plastics, boundaries, and monstrous ecologies and reading a bit from a forthcoming Orion piece.
Wednesday, February 10, 2021
7:00 pm MT (9:00 pm ET)
Zoom: https://arizona.zoom.us/my/joelajacobs
Photo by Meera Subramanian
As a reader I find there are stories that just stick with me; I can’t shake them. But as a journalist, I experience this a thousand-fold. What appears in print can feel like a haiku, with too many interviews and notebook jottings ending up on the cutting room floor. The histories of place I unearthed through research. The letters to the editor in the thin pages of the local newspaper. The anecdotes shared by those who didn’t make it into the piece. The deep story revealed behind and between their words, too big for the bounds of the word-count.
As I finished up each of the nine pieces that were part of the series Finding Middle Ground series for InsideClimate News that I worked on for most of 2017-18, about perceptions of climate change in conservative parts of the country, I would find filaments linking them with each other that I didn’t have room to explore. I’d get tangled in threads leading to stories I’d reported in other parts of the world, a lament I heard from a peach farmer in Georgia echoing what a rice farmer had said in India. There were strands of sinew between what I learned in the field and what I knew from my own personal life, a peripatetic journey that’s granted me multiple vantage points, making me feel at home both nowhere and everywhere at once.
Last year I became a contributing editor of Orion magazine, a publication I’ve read for many years, enjoying the lush richness of its pages, the images and poems and book reviews and NO ADS. (Yes, this is a nonprofit endeavor, and, yes, you can support it by subscribing.) With this piece for Orion, I finally had a chance to reach up for some of those disparate threads that have been floating around in my head since I finished the ICN series and try to weave them into something that made sense. Or, at least, began to make sense. Still, it feels like a haiku. Still, there is so much unsaid at the edges. Because the story of climate change at this moment in time is immense, and shifting. We’re all living this in real-time, the scientists and storytellers and skeptics all. Much of what I found over 18 months of reporting is deeply troubling, the changes underway stirring so much into uncertainty, but I also hold onto the possibility of the disruption as a great opportunity. No rain without thunder and lightning, Frederick Douglass reminded us. And the storm of climate change is here, now. Anything could happen.
The piece begins…
For the past couple of years, I traveled across my country, falling in love with strangers. I sought them out—farmers, ranchers, fly fishermen, evangelicals— and stepped into their lives, uninvited but nearly always, inexplicably, welcome. I sought some kind of connection, asking them questions few seemed to be asking them, about their lives and what they care about and what they believe in. Who they vote for and why. What they remember from before and what they expect in the future, which to their collective grief are often different things.
Craig Fellin fly-fishing on the Big Hole River with his dog Gus, Montana. Photo by Meera Subramanian
Anyone who takes fly-fishing seriously behaves like a scientist. These anglers are biologists, knowledgeable in what’s eating what, when and how. They are hydrologists, studying riffles and stream flow. They are naturalists, observing clouds and sunlight and the circulation of air as their rods flick back and forth across the big sky. They are, in a sense, climate scientists. And some, but not all, are deeply concerned about the effects of a warming climate on the cold-water species that inhabit blue-ribbon trout streams.
But to the extent that they act as climate scientists, partisan politics plays a role in many anglers’ understanding of climate change. Here in Montana, with pristine rivers that are home to some of the best fly-fishing in the country, a majority of votes went for President Trump—and climate change is considered by many of them to be a natural phenomenon beyond human control. Nonetheless, climate change is having a profound influence on fly-fishing, from the timing of insect hatches to the long-term survival of the fish that give this sport its meaning….
Read the full story at InsideClimate News or High Country News.
And I had a great conversation with Nicky Oullet of Montana Public Radio about the story, and you can listen to it here.
Many people have asked me, after presentations or via email, What can I do? Stories should be sparks and the listeners/readers, tinder. The last thing I want is for you to set A River Runs Again/Elemental India down and walk away wiping your hands clean. So, if you’re so inspired….
Here are some of the organizations I focused on in the book as well as others whose efforts I’ve come across in my research. No organization is perfect. I write and explore the efforts, successful and struggling both. So don’t consider this list an endorsement, necessarily, but an excellent starting point for you to make your own explorations and decide to become a member, send a donation, get involved, or simply learn more. [Read more…]
At the Woods Hole portion of the MBL Logan Science Journalism fellowship, we worked with researcher Linda Deegan. Fishscape, one of her projects, is underway here at Toolik. She’s not here now, but I went out today with her research team as they collect data along the Kuparuk River, studying the impact of climate change on the Arctic grayling, a freshwater fish in the salmon family. The commute, via a Roberston-44 helicopter, was pretty thrilling. And, is it just me, or did the face of Jesus appear in the tundra around :30??
The ride was over much too quickly, and [Read more…]
It’s simple. Ten minutes before you plan to bathe, you flip a switch. The light comes on and the water heats up. You wash. You turn the switch off. Geysers, as these small almost-instantaneous-but-not-quite hot water heaters are called in India, are so smart. I don’t keep a kettle simmering all day so that when the urge for a cup of tea strikes, I can have it instantly. (btw, for my tea at home, I use this, one of the best Christmas presents I ever received.) Same idea. Yet this is how we heat water in American homes. It’s the second largest energy expense in the average home, typically accounting for about 18% of the utility bill.
This one in the guest house where I’m staying is particularly cheerful.
My double book review was just published in Caravan magazine, looking at Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India, by Aseem Shrivastava and Ashish Kothari, and Making Peace with the Earth: Beyond Resource, Land and Food Wars, Vandana Shiva’s latest. It’s loaded with (unanswerable) questions.
Is there nothing between the sleepy socialism of India’s first decades that admittedly did little to raise the standard of living for most Indians and the sell-out spree of the recent past that has created a growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots? What happened in the half-century between political independence gained and economic independence relinquished?
After more than three decades on the brink of extinction, the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) — the largest and most threatened wild bird species in the United States — is making a modest recovery, thanks to intensive captive breeding and medical intervention. But troubling data reported this week suggest that unless hunters change their practices, the condor will require extensive support in perpetuity if it is to survive in the wild. [Read more…]
On Monday, the Worldometers clock, which rapidly ticks off the ever-increasing number of humans inhabiting our planet, leapt across the seven-billion mark. In honor of the staggering sum (and with a hat tip to Harper’s), let’s look at some other numbers relating to population.
• Cost of raising a child, birth to age eighteen, excluding college, for a middle-income, two-parent family in the United States as of 2010: $226,920 [Read more…]
Pacific Problems
First we basked with whales, then we explored the aquatic food chain, from the micro to the mouthwatering. In the final part of this mini-series on the state of the sea, let’s turn our gaze to the Pacific Ocean, where coral reefs are tumbling into oblivion, plastic is taking on the form of large land masses, and rampaging rubber duckies are on the loose. There’s some good news too.
Coral reefs are the oases of the oceans, the “rainforests of the sea,” sustaining a quarter of all marine species though they occupy less than 0.1 percent of the world’s watery surface. They are living structures formed by colonies of small creatures that exude calcium carbonate as an exoskeleton, creating masses that are underwater havens of life.
But they’re picky buggers, worse than that prima donna Goldilocks….
