Dear Reader,
I am back home from the woods, but since our topic is watery this week, I will share with you this video glimpse of the Union River at dawn on a cool morning, with mists billowing into the forest. Keats wasn’t kidding when he called this the season of “mists and mellow fruitfulness.”
Review
1,001 Voices on Climate Change:
Everyday Stories of Flood, Fire, Drought, and Displacement from Around the World
Devi Lockwood
Tiller Press, 2021
326 pages
$26.00
Water is life, but it is also lift. Water has the power to release us from gravity, bear us up, and carry us far away with its currents and its tides and the winds that move across its surfaces.
Maybe curiosity is like water. When we wonder about something, when we ask a question, when we really open ourselves to not knowing and wanting to know, we achieve a kind of lightness in motion. A buoyancy.
With a cardboard sign that says “Tell Me a Story about Water” or “Tell Me a Story about Climate Change” hanging around her neck, Devi Lockwood is vibrantly, defiantly buoyant. Her new book, 1,001 Voices on Climate Change chronicles her journey, beginning after college in 2014, by bicycle, freighter, sailboat and other modes of conveyance to collect stories from chance and planned encounters with the people around the world. She often asks about water, because it is a way in to the climate story, more real for many people. She begins in Tuvalu, an island nation in the Pacific facing an existential threat from sea level rise and visits every continent save Antarctica.
A young woman traveling alone by bicycle, Lockwood is both indefatigable and brave. In her vulnerability, needing water, food, and places to camp and bathe, she finds ample opportunity to meet people and experience the grace of their generosity. Families who have very little in material resources, open their homes and care for her. A shale oil engineer welcomes her and shares his story as a worker in the fossil fuel industry. Trying to avoid flying, she makes a passage on a freighter and two more on sail boats. In Cambodia, she survives a dangerous attack from an American man. She bounces back. Buoyant. And strong.
One story in particular sticks with me. In New Zealand, she meets up with a group of activists opposing fossil fuel projects in their community. One Maori elder, a sheep farmer, said, “For us we think the word climate change is a misnomer that actually portrays something different. We prefer to call it ‘the destruction.’ I have always thought of New Zealand as a paradise of biodiversity teeming with endemic species, but the rapid acceleration of livestock farming has had dire consequences. “62% of New Zealand’s rivers are unswimmable because of pathogens mostly from farming . . . Around three-quarters of native freshwater fish in New Zealand are at risk of extinction, and these are just the species that scientists know about.” I will now always be thinking of climate change as The Destruction.
Lockwood writes fluidly with a strong eye for detail. I loved quotes like “salads aren’t the same once you start forest gardening,” and “when you see a skinny bear loping around and standing up, you really realize that that’s Sasquatch.” The nature of this book is episodic, and lends itself to dipping in; the obverse of that coin, is that it lacks a through line at times. The book isn’t really making an argument about climate change per se; it is making the case for a certain set of practices: slow, low-carbon travel, deep listening, community activism, valuing people’s lived experience as a form of expertise. I can’t wait to read what she writes next.
As Lockwood has said, she sees her work as an intervention against climate silence. And a powerful one it is. Deep listening may be a kind of life ring for humanity. It can buoy us up with understanding and give us hope for survival.
And another thing . . .
As an addendum to this week’s review, I want to mention a few other books that, like Lockwood’s, would make excellent gifts for the youthful or “forever young” this holiday season. Booksellers are warning of challenging supply chain conditions, so the time is now to be making our lists and ordering our books. Herewith:
All We Can Save is an empowering, multi-genre anthology of climate writing edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson, with contributions from over 60 women writers. With a friendly graphical format, this book could be inspiring to advanced middle grade through college (and older) readers.
Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara Macanulty recently won the Wainwright Prize for nature writing. Macanulty, a neurodiverse teenager living in Northern Island, wrote this sensitive and moving account of a turbulent year in his life when he was fourteen. It’s a beautiful book.
This is a pre-order, but I am, as the youths say, stoked for Jimmy Chin’s new book of photographs, There and Back, which comes out in December. Chin has selected photos from 20 years of expeditions and tells the dramatic stories behind them.
Other Voices, Other Forms
Speaking of young people and Jimmy Chin, please enjoy this rather astounding and touching video of Jimmy’s daughter, Marina, making her first ascent of the Grand Teton at the age of (wait for it) 7 with Conrad Anker, aka “Uncle Conrad.”
Poem of the Week
In his poem “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life” Walt Whitman speaks to the power of of voices and of water.
For Your Reading Radar
I’m quite intrigued by Barbara King’s new book, Animals’ Best Friends. King, who studies animal cognition and emotion, previously wrote How Animals Grieve. According to her publisher (University of Chicago Press), “[b]ringing together the latest science with heartfelt storytelling, Animals’ Best Friends reveals the opportunities we have in everyday life to help animals in our homes, in the wild, in zoos, and in science labs, as well as those considered to be food.”
For Your Calendar
Shawn Otto the writer and science advocate who founded sciencedebate.org, has a new book called The War on Science. Augustana University in Sioux Falls, SD is hosting Otto for a talk this Thursday, October 12th at 7:30 PM Central. Information here.
Bookshop of the Week
In honor of Devi Lockwood, who earned a masters degree in Science Writing from MIT, let’s visit the MIT Press Bookshop which recently re-opened in the Kendall Square neighborhood of Cambridge, MA. Worth noting is that the shop not only stocks titles in science, art and architecture, computer science, cognition, neuroscience, and linguistics, but also books from MIT Press imprints for kids and teens.
That’s it for next week. Buckle up for next week as the chariot rockets into the future for our first foray in to SciFi with Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.
xo Nicie