A Most Apocalyptic Century

It's not just environmentalist that are given to gloomy thoughts.  Or perhaps environmentalists have a bigger impact on the culture than that are given credit for!

Here I have graphed the number of apocalyptic movies per year since the 1950s.  This decade is just building up a head of stream.  I'll be asking my students to discuss this today.... what does it all mean.

The data is here: List of Apocalyptic Movies.  It'd be useful to express the data as a proportion of the number of movies made each year (using the databases upon which the wikipedia list draws). 

Cemetery Poem

For Kathleen Keane

In the sleet I could not play tin whistle to the dead,
This dusk it was the dead who accompanied me instead.
/10 January 2014

Personal narrative on a journey to find the confluence of the Chicago River and the North Shore Channel

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving I walked, without having given it very much forethought, nor having fortified myself with breakfast, nor even with sufficient tea, a distance of about 7 miles from my home to discover the confluence of the North Shore Channel and the Chicago River. The digging of the former waterway was completed in 1909 in order to bear the sewage from Chicago’s prosperous North Shore communities away from Lake Michigan and into the Chicago River. By that time the Chicago River was itself a marvel of engineering, its flow having been reversed so that all soluble, floatable and mobile waste ran west into the Mississippi watershed rather than into the lake.

Breakfastlessly I walked alongside this water, keeping the channel to my left for the first few miles then crossing over into the parks to the east of the channel.  In many places buckthorn, a dominant invasive species in the Midwest, and by some accounts the most common woody plant in Chicago, is so dense that I only rarely saw water. At its densest the soil under these plants is litter-less and rivulets have rent passageways through the channel bank.

Although it was past 10 AM when I walked under the bridge on Lincoln avenue, a homeless man swiveled in his sleeping bag, his head almost fully submerged, trying, on that cold morning, to stay aslumber.  His radio played a Christmas carol on low; a paperback best seller peeped out from one of his bags.  A little further along a woman behind me asked if I had enough food to keep me going.  I turned but she was talking to another homeless fellow so on I walked.

I had not checked on a map where the confluence occurred, nor did I have a phone that I could consult. I knew that it could not be too far since I had kayaked the Chicago River north of Addison, though that spot was still a few miles to my south. As I walked through a park near Foster Avenue, the Canada geese glanced up from their listless grazing, and I finally spotted the fork where the two waters co-mingle. I could not, however, get close as I was separated from the water by a chain link fence and by phalanxes of those invasive shrubs. I leaned there for a moment against a spindly hackberry.  A Great Blue Heron flapped down to the water’s edge. A little further along I crossed the bridge on Argyle and walked down to the water.  I stood there for a while, and listened to some raucous mallards and looked across what I have been told is the only waterfall within Chicago city limits. The waterfall is concreted heavily and thus the Chicago River, which played no small part in making Chicago the city it is today, spills noiselessly and not especially beautifully into a combined channel with the discharge from the former open sewer.  A family sets up deck chairs on the pavement on the opposite bank.  Supposedly the fishing here is good. Other Chicagoans meandered by as if nothing was happening at all.

Though my achievements were perhaps of a more modest sort, the great German explorer Alexander Von Humboldt could not have been happier as he mapped the Orinoco basin, than I was at my seeing those waters run together.  Mine was not a vast expedition, and my sacrifices were few. But whether I had been the first, or the millionth to see that sight, I had, nonetheless, discovered the meeting of the waters by dint of my own physical effort, and in the process had learned some small things about the workings of the world: spatial relationships between my home and those parks I know less well, their bridges and the streets that surround them. I learned of the tough wintering habits of some homeless people and those who will give them the time of day. I observed the ubiquity of riparian plants and what they can do to soil. I noticed the ways of ice on water, and the twinning of water and birds. And on the walk that returned me to my hearth, I learned about the limits of my own body, as I walked cold, cold streets for mile after urban mile. 

Leaf Poems

I
With my brush the leaves and I conversed
But what we agreed the wind reversed.

II
I have learned more about leaves
By sweeping them than I ever learned
By leaving them alone.

III
Today aspen falls
They tremble when they live
But on earth they lie perfectly still

IV
Japanese Maple
Holds tight to its crimson leaves.
Blood must be played last.

Nov 9th 2013

From Traditional Ecological Research to Philosophico- Social-Ecological Research

One Thousand Urban Miles - Take The Praeger Walking Challenge

In 1902 Robert Lloyd Praeger, the prolific Irish naturalist, recorded a new occurrence of the rare grass Milium effusum (wood millet) in Dublin. He discovered it in Bushy Park, which was adjacent to his home on Zion Road in Rathgar, a few miles south of the city center. This was the park where more than seventy years later I played as a child, being a five-minute walk from my childhood home. It is the park that I visit every time I return to Dublin.

In Ireland, Praeger is associated with the botanical investigation of that country’s wildest places. Less attention has been paid to Praeger as a proto-urban ecologist: a naturalist who spent most of his life in the city, who wrote extensively about his garden, and who devoted a chapter of his most renowned book, The Way That I Went, An Irishman in Ireland (1937), to Dublin and its environs. He wrote there on the famous wagtail roosts in O’Connell Street, the ferns on Dublin walls, and the plants on North Bull Island, a coastal conservation area in Dublin bay. He and a small team also surveyed and wrote extensively on Lambay Island a couple of miles off the coast, north of the city.

In addition to his urban interests, what appeals to me about Praeger is that though in many ways he was a fairly traditional natural historian whose extensive writings—in all there were 800 papers and twenty-four books—detail the distribution of plants in Ireland, he nonetheless wrote reflectively and lyrically about botanical field work as a pleasure for its own sake. Praeger raised walking to the level of exultation and methodology, and not conveyance merely. After all, his most famous book is The Way That I Went—not Where I Went and What I Found There.

I have been working on a lengthy essay on Praeger in recent months, having spent a week last February rummaging through his archives in the Royal Irish Academy, in Dublin. During this time, the idea occurred to me that not only is there a Praegerian product (all those papers and books) but there is also a Praegerian spirit: a spirit of openness to the world, a type of attentiveness that Praeger insists one can cultivate only on foot. Working on this material, I decided that I would, as a type of sympathetic exercise, embrace Praeger’s peripatetic inclination, but employ it in a strictly urban direction, bringing together two parts of Praeger’s work and interests. I am proposing therefore, over each of the next five years, to walk 1000 miles in the city. I invite you to join me by planning a thousand-mile walk of your own in the city or town in which you live. Before you commit, let me give you a little more information on the great man himself and the significance of the 1000-mile annual walk.

Read on at City Creatures here