Crowds and Power - Worth a re-read

 

I'm interested in the feelings of being in crowds - the sense of belonging. The vertiginous sense that all control will be lost. It's been many years since I read Canetti on this topic but he's always worth a read. His memoirs: The Tongue Set Free (1977), The Torch in My Ear (1980), The Play of the Eyes" (1985) and the novel Auto-da-Fé (1935), are also worth a visit.

Can we restore nature? In seeking a means to heal our wounded planet, we should look to the painstaking, cautious craft of art conservation

 It is our sad lot that we love perishable things: our friends, our parents, our mentors, our partners, our pets. Those of us who incline to nature draw this consolation: most lovely natural things – the forests, the lakes, the oceans, the reefs – endure at scales remote from individual human ones. One meaning of the Anthropocene is that we must witness the unravelling of these things too. A tree we loved in childhood is gone; a favourite woodlot is felled; a local nature preserve invaded, eroded and its diversity diminished; this planet is haemorrhaging species.

When a rare Panamanian frog was named in 2005 for George Rabb, an eminent herpetologist and friend to many in the Chicago conservation community, we celebrated this newly named animal. By the time he died in 2017, Rabb’s fringe-limbed frog (Ecnomiohyla rabborum) was assumed extinct in the wild.

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The Badgers of Montpelier Hill

When I was a child growing up in Dublin, a friend dropped her pet hamster on the kitchen floor. The animal survived but thereafter he could only walk in circles. As the hamster got older, the circles got wider but like a ship permanently anchored to shore it never got particularly far.

Like most children, I had taken a fall or two and because I was a worrier I felt concerned that like that hamster I would never travel very far. Though I did, indeed, travel and I am now thousands of miles from home, I still think of my life as occurring in a series of ever widening circles.

At first, I was confined to our back garden. We lived in the Templeogue Village an inglorious suburb on what at the time was a trailing edge of Dublin. Over the garden wall were farm fields and farther off were the Dublin Mountains.

Sure enough over the years, I explored the fields and when I got a little older, I would cycle into the foothills of those mountains.

Now there was one hill in particular that I was drawn to: officially called Montpelier Hill it is also called The Hell Fire Club. The story was that a structure built there in the early 1700s as a hunting lodge for delinquent aristocratic youth had also been used by them for somewhat darker practices. One night the devil himself showed up there at a card game. In the hubbub that followed, a candle was knocked over and the lodge burned to the ground. By the time I started to cycle there, The Hellfire Club was an innocuous forestry plantation. The burned lodge remains.

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A place of silence

New Piece in Aeon

"Our cities are filled by the hubbub of human-made noise. Where shall we find the quietness we need to nurture our spirit?"

To walk from south to north on the peripatos, the path encircling the Acropolis of Athens – as I did one golden morning in December last year – takes you past the boisterous crowds swarming the stone seats of the Theatre of Dionysus. The path then threads just below the partially restored colonnades of the monumental Propylaea, which was thronged that morning with visitors pausing to chat and take photographs before they clambered past that monumental gateway up to the Parthenon. Proceed further along the curved trail and, like an epiphany, you will find yourself in the wilder north-facing precincts of that ancient outcrop. In the section known as the Long Rocks there are a series of alcoves of varying sizes, named ingloriously by the archaeologists as caves A, B, C and D. In its unanticipated tranquility, this stretch of rock still seems to host the older gods.

I sat below these caves that morning appreciating a respite from the tumult and, for a few minutes, I just listened. The pursuit of quietness, especially in urban areas has become a preoccupation of mine in recent years. However, the quiet I experienced below the caves of Zeus Astrapaios, of Apollo and of Pan was not precisely an encounter with silence, for it was punctuated by many sounds. A family of cats mewled; the wind gusted playfully across the limestone and the schist, and sent the leaves scuttering along the pavement. A murmur of voices rose up occasionally from the cafes of the Plaka neighbourhood; someone, somewhere, played a melancholy air on the klarino. All of these sounds were pleasant to my ears. This form of quietness, one that is not precisely silence, is characterised rather by an absence of noise or βοή (voe) in Greek, a word that might also translate as clamour, or din. I call the sort of auditory lull that, at the same time, asserts a benevolent presence, ‘avoesis’ (that is, the absence of voe or noise).

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The Last Holy Night - A Christmas Memory

On Christmas mornings in Dublin in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s my siblings would line up along the stairs ordered by age—a serried and, over the years, elongating rank of exuberance Heneghan children—before descending to give and receive (mainly to receive) gifts.

Tinsel glistered on the banisters—my mother having stayed up late a couple of weeks before to surprise us with the decorations—I can remember each enchanting piece: the wreaths, the multi-hued tinsel, a plastic Santa face on the kitchen door, the sprigs of plastic holly, and Christmas cards from friends and family known and obscure (“who was Uncle Neddie?”), arrayed on strings stretched across the walls, each greeting attached by a little festive red clip. How the fairy lights twinkled on the tree; in more adventurous years we had flashing lights, but the steadier glow from the fairy-tale carriage lights were more evocative. A manger constructed in his by my father crafty years—drilled, if I correctly recall, into an alcove adjacent to the hall door—hosted the Holy Family, the visiting Magi, and an appropriately sized herd of domesticated animals statically venerating the infant Christ who had been installed that previous evening by the youngest and presumptively godliest of us children onto his little bed of hay.

The run-up to the big day had been a frenzy of yuletide delights: we had taken out and read, and reread Christmassy storybooks, we had visited the illuminated shop-fronts on Grafton Street, we had compiled our lists—I once requested and received a tin of baked beans (thanks Santa Claus, I suppose)—and like flocks of festive but discordant sparrows, neighborhood children flitted from house to house singing carols for some charity or another. We were in the mood for Christmas. Even that year, when caroling with the St Pius X school choir near St Stephen’s Green and I had vomiting so splashingly on the frozen footpath, and my fellow tiny choristers circled around my racked body to shield the festive crowd from the tiny outrage, I now count among the legendary Christmases.

It was Midnight Mass—which in our parish was held at 9:30 pm on Christmas Eve (“and we all know why,” as Father Lee once declared with a sigh, though we did not, in fact, really know why; perhaps mass was early to avoid last call at The Morgue in the village, and the subsequent grand disgorging of revelers who might stagger into church for a Christmas benediction and a nice snooze)—it was Midnight Mass that was the acme of the excitement, at least in those years that I remained faithful. We listened to the nativity story, sometimes both Saint Matthew and Saint Luke’s being read aloud by Father Lee, and then we children would compete to make my mother laugh during the service—(how many children, I wonder, have fancied themselves comedians because they once upon a time made their mother laugh?)

And then Christmas would truly arrive when Billy Lang, the local tenor, mounted the stair to the balcony at St Pius X Basilica and sang O Holy Night to the hushed congregation. Oh how secure we felt, how sheltered from the elements, how sacred it all was.

The year that Billy Lang lay dying of cancer, he had been cautioned against it, and yet he still came to mass, and we all waited—several congregants sobbing—as he was helped up the stairs to give his last rendition of that glorious hymn. When I reflect upon it now (the years are becoming harder to separate) I might no longer have been a child when Billy sang one final time, but that night, in retrospect, was to be the last of my childhood Christmases, if not, in fact, the very last night of childhood.

Alternative Field Trips To The Art Institute Of Chicago: Broken Art

The Art Institute of Chicago is unremarkable in this one respect: like every world class art museum its galleries teem with works representing indefatigable artistic industry besieged by the entropic desolation that all the works of humankind are heir to.

Our lot is to amass and assemble; the universe responds, dispassionately, with decay and dispersion. Millennia of creative effort crumble away. Walk through any decent sized art museum and behold the craquelure of old oils, the loss of patina in the watercolors, the splintering of carved wood, dents in metalwork, and the extremities snapped off old stonework. Can there be a pleasure in art that is completely unhinged from the intimations of loss ? The sense of loss that decay evokes may intensify pleasure if you incline to morbidity.

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There will be no Hunter-Gatherers on Mars

Two headlines in summer 2018 caught the attention of space aficionados. Together they renew optimism on the part of some people that humans will become the first known multi-planetary species.

The first headline “A Large Body of Water on Mars Is Detected, Raising the Potential for Alien Life” appeared in the New York Times (July 25, 2018) and was based upon a paper published shortly thereafter in the journal Science (3 August 2018) providing radar evidence for subglacial liquid water on Mars.

The second headline “Beyond the Shadow of a Doubt, Water Ice Exists on the Moon” appeared in Scientific American (August 21, 2018). In that article the author, Leonard David, wrote that the water was “deposited in perpetually dark craters around the poles” and suggested that “the ice could be a boon for future crewed lunar outposts.”

These two headlines remind us that though we have yet to confirm the existence of life elsewhere in the universe—and perhaps that confirmation will never come—that living things require resources upon which to subsist. Thus, a search for the primary resources upon which life depends (or alternatively for the distinctive wastes generated by living entities)—both searches, we should mention, assume that we know what “life” is, exactly, which we don’t—often surrogate for the direct detection of alien organisms. Attempts to search for aliens organisms will follow any promising leads from the search for resources and waste.

Water being sovereign among the resource needs of life (most organisms will die of thirst long before dying of starvation), the discovery of extraterrestrial water thus points to putative indigenous life on those planets (and satellites) where it is detected. Whatever about the conjectured needs of alien life, without doubt humans are a thirsty species, and the existence of extra-terrestrial water encourages aspirations to support human life off this particular planet upon which you and I are discussing these issues.

Now, interesting though these developments may be, we might ask why an environmental scientist—an urban ecologist in particular—should be more than casually distracted by them? For two reasons, I think. Though it didn’t have to be so, the prospect of space colonization has often seemingly been motivated by concerns about resource shortages on Earth. Certain elements, such as deuterium used in nuclear reactors, are hyper-available on Mars and could be profitably returned to the ‘home planet’. Additionally, rare metals like platinum, gold, and silver, can be mined on Mars for use back on Earth.

Beyond these immediate implications, the two articles illuminate the following issues: the difficulty of defining (and detecting) life, the reaffirmation not only our sense of aloneness in the solar system, but also the herculean (and expensive) efforts that are expended in attempting to meet the neighbors, so as to speak, and finally the papers hint at the machinations that will be required to colonize another planet—maintaining life in xeno-environments.

Making space more tangibly part of the resource shadow of Earthlings is one thing but the prospect of space colonization as providing a alternative home in the event of planetary despoliation is quite another. Yet, there is in the literature of space colonization and terraforming a notion that off-planet colonies provide a “Plan B” in the event of a catastrophe on this planet.

Gerard K O’Neill (1927–1992) the Princeton physicist and space exploration enthusiast, framed his advocacy for space colonies explicitly in the context of concern over environmental pollution and the ‘evils” consequent from the Industrial Revolution. In The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1976) O’Neill wrote “the evils of environmental damage (pollution and so forth) are minor compared to others that have appeared: sharp limits on food, energy and materials confront us at a time when most of the human race is still poor, and when much of it is on the edge of starvation.” The solution, as O’Neill saw it, was not to “retreat to a pastoral, machine-free society…” No, the future rather is in space colonies that should be free-floating in space and thus open to constant solar radiation supplying us with unlimited energy. Such space colonies, O’Neill wrote, will follow on as “an inevitable result of the large-scale development of space resources.” Space will ultimately become a “new Earthlike environmental range for humanity, bathed in continuous free energy…” — humans’ newest habitat.

I should note that in January 1976, O’Neill appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Aerospace Technology and National Needs laying out a case for an Apollo-style program for building power plants in space. Ultimately, these plans were regarded as “nutty” and funding space colonization research was cut from NASA’s budget.

*

Space conquest has had a curious green tinge for decades. Colonizing space potentially extends the human project into its newest phase. For all its novelty, for all the ways in which space colonies capitalize upon emerging technologies, they nonetheless are an extension of the territorial expansionist impulse that has long been part of our species’ repertoire. Space colonies are besides—and this is really the main purpose of this short essay— the next increment in an explicitly urban project that began several thousands of years ago.

Although the term “colony” is used in the literature on expansion into space, many advocates preferring more neutral terms like “settlements” and “outposts.” Carl Sagan (1934 –1996), who remain the most famous space advocate referred to space “cities” rather than “colonies” to avoid the negative connotation associated with colonization. Sagan is being diplomatic— after all colonization has lost the luster of its heydays—but in calling them “cities” he is, at the same time, being terminologically accurate. 

In imagining the earliest cities, we can ask how their small populations were sustained. How did they transform their hinterlands? There is a significant literature that reports on such investigations. The sustenance of space cities and the degree to which they will transform other planets should interest us. Since this is to be our remote future and not our remote past, the future of the humanity may depend upon it

Conceiving of these space cities (or town, hamlets and so on) and embarking on space-urban-planning is a useful thought-experiment. It not only draws out a definition of what a city is—a question that has a long, contentious, and unresolved history— but also tasks us with creating a list of what we would need to bring along with us in order to sustain life off planet. For example, an astronaut tripping across the lunar surface did not need to bring gravity with them. However, strapped to their back and pumped into the lungs is a tank containing a rough approximation of the Earth’s atmosphere. That astronaut will also have access to other physiological and psychological necessities to endure the trip. What, on a grander scale, will an entire colonizing community need to pack with them to replicate, even minimally, the accoutrements of civilization?   

*

All colonized planets, and asteroids, and even space stations, will be urban in character.

There will be no hunter-gatherer phase on Mars, nor will humans need to reinvent agriculture there; we will load upon our space vessels our literacy, social hierarchies, capitalism, and all of the urban delights, excesses and disasters and take them along for the ride.

When or if cities are established on other planets the sequence of urban development will thus extend from Ancient/Classical cities (to around 1250), Mercantile/Colonial cities (to 175), Industrial/Imperial (to 1970), Post Industrial/Post-Colonial (to present), to Non-terrestrial/space cities. Since most of us live in post-industrial cities, we do not have direct access to other forms of urban development. Of course, there are remnants of previous stages accessible as either living fossils distributed across the landscapes of contemporary cities, or as ruins that we can visit or read about, but the more remote historical stages are obscure.


Image from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization

Reading Matters: Storytime With Children

By

Liam Heneghan

Once upon a time, in a beautiful but endangered forest far far away a prince and princess met, fell in love and married. They were blessed with a hundred children. “I wonder,” said the princess, somewhat exhausted from her exertions, “how best to raise our dear ones to care for each other and their beautiful forest home?” “I have heard,” replied her husband “that reading to children matters.”

Being of a scientific inclination, the royal couple assigned twenty children to each of five experimental groups. They prevented these children for mingling—for keeping the groups apart was deemed good experimental practice—and assessed if reading matters asking following questions. Should one read aloud to children, or narrate stories of a parent’s own devising, or read and discuss plot points at length as one proceeds through storytime, or should one perhaps, as early as possible, cultivate the youth to read on their own and abandon them to their own devices? One group of children—“our little controls” as the happy couple called them—were raised without the benefit of any stories at all.

The results of this longitudinal study were alas inconclusive. The prince haughtily accused his wife of surreptitiously reading to the control group; the princess icily retorted that her husband’s monotonic voice had lulled everyone asleep thus undermining the study. “I’d sooner stab myself in the ears than listen to another word from you.” Their scientific paper was rejected for publication; the couple lost their funding. They all lived happily ever after.

*

An experiment, such as the one in my fairy tale, evaluating the importance of storytime, may strike us as rather unseemly. There is indeed an ample scientific literature on the efficacy of reading to the young, though it has developed using less drastic research protocols. Since storytime is a cherished practice and therefore omnipresent in schools, libraries, and homes it has been the subject of many rigorously designed “natural” experiments (where scholars simply evaluate ongoing practices without deliberately manipulating them in the lab). This research evaluating outcomes in different settings affirms that reading aloud to children enriches a child’s vocabulary, enhances general literacy, entices the child to persist in reading for pleasure, and can, besides, increase empathy, tolerance, reflection and a range of virtues. Besides, time spent reading is time not spent watching television, the baleful implications of which are routinely mentioned by researchers in this field. Reading can, under the right circumstances, also help children become more attuned to the natural world. Less attention has been paid to this environmental desideratum of reading and storytelling than to other aspects of reading. Because of this gap, I have devoted a considerable part of my research time in the past few years to thinking about how bedtime can cultivate the environmental sensibilities of the child.

*

It is a rare parent, of course, that gears up for the arrival of their infant with a preparatory review of the academic literature. Yet even without the benefit of this prefatory labour and even without having the benefit of a hundred children with whom to experiment most new parents and guardians quite intuitively surmise the virtues of storytelling. A bedtime story is as much a part of the institution of the family as birthday parties and early morning snuggles. The benefits seem self-apparent, and the methods, are adaptively applied. Parents simply go with what works and will improvise a strategy that best suits them

Storytime can settle a child down, and prepare them for crossing that often fraught threshold between daytime and nighttime. Those of us in our middle years often employ the expression “sleeping like a baby” to indicate our nostalgia for those magnificent slumbers of earlier life phases. However, to do so is to forget that enticing the child to relinquish the day, and submit to sleep is an enduring domestic battle. A story can help that process along and can, besides, provide comforting fodder for their reveries as the child nods off to sleep.

One might hesitate before intruding upon the soft but potent comforts of the bedtime story ritual by adding, say, the burden of vocabulary lessons, or ethical training, or even the tutoring of environmentally salutary behaviour. There may indeed be those guardians who can with didactic resolve turn the nighttime routine into a lesson of sorts. However, one imagines that this approach can be soporific. Thus, instituting pedagogic programs at bedtime may end up satisfying another less exalted ambition and the child will be gently snoring before the second bullet point of the crepuscular lesson plan.

More realistically, parents and teachers, aware of what reading aloud, or storytelling more generally, can achieve can make laudable choices in the books they read to children—and let the books do the work. Many books, ABC books most conspicuously, have this design in mind. In addition, a parent can fortify this oblique lesson by incorporating commendable themes into bedtime chats with their child. No need for PowerPoint slides!

*

Though one surely never retires as a parent, but since both my children are now adults, the heavy lifting seems to be done. Our children are unleashed upon the world; we did the best we could. Though it has been some years since I read to them nightly, it is only quite recently that we’ve moved their libraries from their bedrooms to the basement. The process has been a slow one, because as I moved them I was drawn again to these books and started to reread. What I noticed almost immediately was that many of the titles they loved were nature-themed. A hefty percentage were about animals.

As an ecologist, I had, of course, purchased books that I thought would provide especially valuable lessons about the environing world. Some of these books appealed to them—Paul Geraghty’s The Great Green Forest (1992), for example, is a delight—others were duds. More often than not the books my children were attracted to were the standard fare of enduring classics (The Hobbit (1937), Heidi (1881), The Secret Garden (1911), Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), and so on) as well as more recent books (The Harry Potter series, The Hunger Games series, etc.). It became apparent to me that even stories that were less obviously environmental contained profound lessons about nature.

After some fitful progress on this reading project—for the first time I was reading Harry Potter books on my morning train commute—I gave myself a couple of years to systematically excavate the environmental themes in children’s books. The results are reported in a book called Beasts at Bedtime: Revealing the Environmental Wisdom in Children’s Literature (2018). What I found is that arrayed across classic children’s literature is a hidden environmental curriculum. This really should not surprise us, since many writers for children’s were quite explicit in their green sensibilities. JRR Tolkien—whose enduring fondness of trees is well known, and Beatrix Potter—an animal enthusiast and amateur mycologist—are merely the most obvious among these.

*

In one of his more peculiar essays, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming (1908), Sigmund Freud drew parallels between the creative processes of the mature artist and the play of children. Both involve the spinning of phantasms. In that essay, Freud proposed that daydreams, like sleeping dreams, are wish fulfilling. Daydreams have the following structure: they link in the mind a recollection of the past with some impression from the present moment, and impels us towards some future ambition, the fulfillment of the wish.

A mature artist will have a reservoir of experiences to draw upon, whereas the child is mainly futurally inclined. The reason that stories are so compelling and important for children—and this, I should say, is my theory not Freud’s—is that they enlarge the repository of experiences that the young mind can draw upon. Children in their day-to-day world are already attuned to nature—loving their pets, splashing in puddles, collecting random scraps found in nature (pebble, branches, spiders in matchboxes), and so on. Thus, the stories read or told to them by an environmentally adroit parent can combine a compelling fictional experience, with the child’s immediate interests, and can prepare the child for the future.

Just as it is necessary for a parent to be conventionally literate themselves in order to ensure their children growing literacy, a parent must be environmentally literate in order to ensure their young charges get the most from their books. A parent turns to the written page for conventional literacy, but to inculcate environmental literacy they need to incline towards the out-of-doors. A well-prepared parent must read not just stories alone, but must be prepared to read the book of nature.

*

Once upon a time in numerous forests both near and far, dozens of princes and princess, met each other, fell in love, and had many, many children. Now, these royals lived at a time when vast swirling forces imperiled their forested dwelling, and the parents worried for their children’s futures. So the parents read to the children. Some of those children loved hungry caterpillars, some loved a simple but very thoughtful bear, some loved hobbits, some loved a rambunctious boy with a companionable tiger, and others loved a little girl living in the Alps with her grandfather….  And when those children grew up, lo and behold they found they were equipped to protect their forests from injurious activities. They all lived happily ever after.

Liam Heneghan is professor of environmental science and studies at DePaul University. He is a Dubliner, and a father of two grown children to whom he read every night of their early years. His book Beastsat Bedtime: Revealing the Environmental Wisdom in Children’s Literature in now available.

Have kids or do not have kids, but let’s not blame climate change

A writer’s path is paved with the flagstones of their unread essays. Years ago I wrote an essay entitled “Soil and Myself” for the collection Irish Spirit (Wolfhound, 2001). I was attempting there to come to grips with my youthful loss of religious faith and my growing enchantment with the earth as a source of inspiration and solace. This spiritual crisis occurred in the early eighties, an era when the dimensions of our global environmental problems were becoming apparent. I fell in love with a damaged world.

My turning to nature was a physical one to be sure, but my late teen years were also a time of reverie inspired by those Irish writers that cared about both people and wild landscapes: Liam O’Flaherty, W.B. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, for example, and by all the earthy shenanigans recorded in the Irish mythological cycles. An apposite ratio of nature hikes and of literary contemplation provided me a foundation for optimistic living.

“Soil and Myself” was published, the world turned, and I moved along as writers are wont to do. Several years later, I got a letter from a reader—perhaps the essays only one—who remarked on how the piece had moved her. She was getting on, she wrote, and was latterly attempting to draw consolation from the same sources I had. As a codicil, she noted that she had elected not to have children because of her worry about nuclear armageddon. Why bring a child into this damned world? She concluded wistfully that had she had a child that child would be my age now. By the time I got that letter I had survived nearly four decades without facing down any real calamities.

This small but arresting exchange came to mind on reading a number of recent pieces that assume a bleak environmental future. For example, a recent Onion headline quips dolefully “Sighing, Resigned Climate Scientists Say to Just Enjoy Next 20 Years As Much As You Can.” In in a less droll fashion, the Climate Change and Life Events app allows users map their future against projections of future temperatures (https://climate-life-events.herokuapp.com/). The future will not look like the past. The New York Times reports on some couples’ deliberations about their reproductive future in the light of such realities: “No Children Because Of Climate Change? Some People Are Considering It” (New York Times, Feb 5, 2018). A new generation considers the prospects of raising children in perilous times. Unlike nuclear annihilation, which, so far, has failed to materialize, the bombs of climate change, so to speak, have already left their bunkers, though there is some uncertainty about their yield. Facing an uncertain environmental future, and occupying a planet that horrifyingly may be unable to sustain its burgeoning human population, determining to have, or not have, a child is a fraught decision.

Even if the world’s population stabilizes in the next century (which seems likely) and does so within the limits of our finite planet (which is less certain), one might still hesitate before choosing to offer up your notional child to this crammed, tempestuous, and warmly steaming world.

*

Faced with such prospects—and as an environmentalist I was an early adopter of cataclysmic thinking, despite the sustaining quality of my early nature-reveries—my wife and I had our first child twenty-six years ago. Since she and I never dated and simply got married (don’t try this at home kids) we never had that conversation about kids that others seemingly do. I rather assumed we would not have children, regarding this as bad environmental practice, she rather assumed we would, regarding this as something that humans just do. We added another child to our reproductive tally four years later.

Had my wife been of the same mind as me, I might not have ever thought of the matter again. There are times now, when reexamining my cavalier indifference to parenting that I shudder to realize how blithely I might have set aside my life’s greatest pleasure. Not to have children would have seemed a failure of optimism. Not merely a failure to hope that crises can averted—perhaps they cannot— but a failure to imagine our children as being capable of loving this planet, however besmirched it may be.

Environmental calamity puts food on our family’s table. Thus, our kids grew up being aware of the full panoply of planetary horrors. Both boys are cognizant of what they are facing. My joy in parenting them notwithstanding, it’s fair to ask if we did them a disservice in birthing them into such a world.

I texted our boys to ask if they remain enthusiastic about the ambiguous gift we presented them in the light of what they now know about the world. Both answered in a way that reflects their adult interests. The eldest, a philosophy graduate student, texted: “There is no standpoint from which to sensibly ask whether life is going well, like a poker game, because there is no external standpoint.”

The younger child, an economics graduate student, took a more pragmatic approach: “I’m good with it…,” he wrote, “…although it’s difficult to say because it may get harder in the future. Right now, I good though. I’m content with this whole existing stuff.”

I suggest you try this sobering exercise with your children.

*

When both our children left home, the nightly task of locking up our, now empty, nest continued to fall to me. Instead of securing our children, ensconced in their feather beds, in the home, I lock them out instead. Since they left, I have been giving thought to the question of how prepared these kids are for the world that awaits them beyond the lintel. They certainly seem open to those perennial and perplexing gifts this battered world can offer: love, friendship, the joys of reflection, the joys of creativity. Like me, at their age, they draw solace from wild nature and interactions with non-human beings. Both have a warm regard for animals.

What else, I wondered, embolden them to be (cautiously) hopeful?

I got a partial answer as I moved the boys’ childhood library from bedrooms to basement. Or rather, my wife moved them, and I reread them. As I glanced at these books—from the classics to contemporary titles—on these short ambles through the house, it struck me that both boys’ optimism had been cultivated by the stories they read as mine had been years before (and continues to be). The world, even a fictional one, has its frightful moments undoubtedly. Yet powerful lessons abound in both life and in stories about how we can persist in loving and caring for the world.

*

After I lost my religious faith, and turned to the soil, and to stories rooted in the soil, it was not to lose myself there and ignore the breakages of the natural world. One can remain aware of such troubles, and yet be content to endure with all this “existing stuff.” Surely, we are not such latecomers to the world that we feel incapable of cultivating awe, love, and hope.

By all means, have a child in these precarious times. Hell, have two. Or don’t have kids at all. However, neither climate change, nor nuclear threats, nor even the heat death of the universe, for that matter, should stop you.

If you do have children, help them fall in love with the world. Immersion in nature and in quiet repose with books can help. Someday your kids may begrudgingly thank you for their existence if you care to ask them about it. Unless, of course, they haughtily refuse the very premise of your question. Cheeky, hopeful, blighters that they are.

Liam Heneghan is a professor of environmental science and studies at DePaul University. His book, Beasts at Bedtime Revealing the Environmental Wisdom in Children’s Literature (University of Chicago Press) will come out in May 2018. (lhenegha@gmail.com)

Motivation for Writing Beasts at Bedtime

You've been warned: The Garden of Earthly Delights

You've been warned: "Although Bosch’s Paradise is undeniably a garden, and hell is a garden of a hideous sort, the Earthly garden is neither perfect, nor is it horrifying. It’s an amalgam of sorts. The garden we live in may be what we make of it: if your life is not sensual, pleasurable, or fruitful enough, you have just a moment of two to repair the situation, for one may not tarry in the Garden of Earthly Delights."

Caring for the Rose: Environmental Literacy and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince

by Liam Heneghan

If you happen to crash-land on a desert island with your child—let’s say, to soften this traumatic vision, that this is a beautiful and gently undulating hot-air balloon descent—I hope that your copy Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1943) survives the incident. Saint-Exupéry, an early aviator, was no stranger to crash-landings in deserts. Indeed, the inspiration for this beloved novella came, in part, from an airplane crash in the Libyan desert on 30th December 1935 when Saint-Exupéry’s attempted to break the speed record for a flight from Paris to Saigon. Saint-Exupéry and his mechanic, André Prévot, miraculously survived. The duo endured several increasingly hallucinatory days before being rescued by a Bedouin traveler who revived the Frenchmen. For all its gauzy fairy tale quality, The Little Prince is, nonetheless, erected upon very real sands, and if some find in it an almost unbearable inclination to fatalism, and to intimations of mortality, these too are based upon the concrete realities of Saint-Exupéry’s life. Unsurprisingly, he died relatively young (44) when on 31st July 1944, his reconnaissance airplane took off from a Corsican airbase and disappeared into thin air.

Not only is The Little Prince one of the few books that on each fresh reading resonates for adults and children alike, it has also attracted considerable academic attention. It’s not clear, to judge from Saint-Exupéry’s dismissal of the geographer occupying a little asteroid in The Little Prince as a remote pedant who “does not leave the desk,” that he would be all that impressed by his reputation among the professors. The Little Prince is undeniably a stirring tale but it is philosophically chewy besides, hence its academic reputation. As you sit beneath the palm tree (recall that you’ve survived a trauma-less balloon crash and are now on an island) and read the story to your child over and over again, not only will this reading foster tender and unforgettable moments for both of you but should it becomes necessary for your child to recreate everything important in our world once they leave the island (perhaps your misadventure portends apocalyptic times,) The Little Prince can provide the blueprints. For this novella contains in staccato a complete guide to understanding our responsibilities in caring for the world. And though Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is no ordinary environmentalist this is a book that clears a path towards comprehensive environmental literacy.

Saint-Exupéry is represented in The Little Prince as the aviator who has crashed in the “Desert of Sahara.” He is also, to some extent, the eponymous Little Prince too, though the prince is also, in part, modeled on Saint-Exupéry younger brother, François, who died of rheumatic fever at age 15. When the Little Prince passes from this world and the aviator observes “He fell gently as a tree falls. There was not even any sound”, these were words Saint-Exupéry first wrote in reference to his brother’s passing. The Little Prince whose romantic entanglements with an inordinately vain, though undeniably intriguing, rose had begun to overwhelm him, traveled from his home asteroid—B-612—and winds up on Earth, in the desert, and he appears to the stranded aviator. The aviator has no immediate prospect of rescue and works on his plane while engaging with our extraterrestrial prince.

A center-piece of the story’s charm is its dismissal of adult pretensions and of materialistic values. For all of this, it is, of course, written by an adult and the tension between the Little Prince’s impatience with “grown-up and their ways” and the fact that this message is filtered through Saint-Exupéry, a grown-up, albeit an idiosyncratic and gifted one, provides the distinctive mood of the work.  The novel is nostalgic for lost innocence: innocent ethical values to be sure, but also for unblemished landscapes, for the clarity that the desert brings, and the quiddity of all basic human needs. “It was a matter of life and death for me,” says the aviator in the story who is facing a imminent dehydration. What is it to be human? What is it to be human? Saint-Exupéry is not to first, nor will he be the last, to address the question, but this is, besides, first and foremost an ecological question.

Doctor Foster’s Disastrous Trip to Gloucester: Antipathy to Urban Life in Nursery Rhymes

by Liam Heneghan
[Dedicated to Oisín on his 21st birthday--a man with a grudging regard for a good rhyme]

Undoubtedly, the reading of nursery rhymes, some silly, some quite profound, and all generally teetering on the brink of insanity, shapes, in their early years, the environmental sensibilities of many children. Considering the supposed importance of these rhymes what should we make of the vast silence of nursery rhymes on important questions concerning urbanization and metropolitan planning?

Nursery rhymes are regularly preoccupied, in an often healthily irreverent way, with nature. Of the one hundred and seventeen rhymes collected and illustrated by Eric Kincaid in Nursery Rhymes (1990) all but twenty-three are set out-of-doors. Fully forty-three percent concern animals: dogs, cats, pigs and hens are especially prevalent. There is one rhyme in which a ship with a well-laden hull is captained by a duck: when the ship moved, this duck, predictably enough, said “Quack, quack.” (I Saw a Ship a-sailing). Many report on very strange human-animal encounters: Little Miss Muffet and her spider, for example, or the girl in Once I say a Little Bird whose ambivalence about the bird hopping on her sill resulted in it flying away. Other rhymes, ten or so, address encounters with inanimate objects, the weather and so forth. One Misty, Moisty, Morning remarks on the weather and, by-the-by, on an old man who is clad all in leather; Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and I see the Moon concern matters supra-mundane. At least one addresses, if you squint at it, the laudable virtue of family planning: There Was An Old Woman Who Lived in Shoe, who in the opinion of the rhymester at least had too many children: apparently, she didn’t know what to do.

Vegetation, in contrast to animals and inanimate nature, gets short shrift in the ditty canon. By my count in Kincaid’s volume there are only three rhymes specifically devoted to plants (or their fruit): I Had a Little Nut Tree, Oranges and Lemons, and The Hart he loves the High Wood. However, Kincaid’s illustrations more than compensate for the absence of greenery in the text of his collection of rhymes. Just more than half (60 in total) of the rhymes are illustrated with vegetation. Perhaps this just reflects Kincaid’s inclination towards green things. Just how much does Kincaid like his plants? On four occasions he adds a floral motif to wallpaper or on the curtains—Kincaid’s work is gratuitously botanical! It may be fair to say, though, that greenery is just a given in the universe of rhymes even if plants themselves do not consume the attention of the rhyme-crafters nor the children who listen to them. There is an interesting parallel here with the under-representation of vegetation in Paleolithic art—so total is the primeval mind’s preoccupation with animals there’s no plants there either.

As with plants, the number of explicit references to urban locations is very low. Nine rhymes out of Kincaid’s one hundred and seventeen either refer to specific towns, or more generically, to urban locales, or reference some aspect of urban life. These are As I was going to St Ives, Doctor Foster went to Gloucester, How Many Miles to Babylon, London Bridge, Oh, the Brave Old Duke of York, There was a Girl in our Town, This Little Pig Went to Market, Yankee Doodle Came to Town, and To Market, To Market. By my count there are an additional nine rhymes that are clearly set in towns of some size. Examples of such rhymes include Wee Willie Winkie, a rhyme that is, if one lingers on it, the very stuff of nightmares: the eponymous character runs about town in his night-gown yelling at children through their locked doors. Seemingly, they should be in bed.

Perhaps we should shrug off the paucity of references to metropolitan life in nursery rhymes as not necessarily a slight to urban living. But unlike what we saw to be the case for plants, this time Kincaid does not supplement what is missing from the doggerel with illustrations. Very few pieces are set in the wilderness, A Man in the Wilderness, being one, most of them are set in rural locations: in the countryside or in hamlets or small towns. Nursery rhymes record the madcap trials and tribulations of rustic life. Views of big city living just don’t make the cut.
In trying to come to terms with the absence of urban rhymes two questions come to mind. Why is this so and what are the implications? The first is quite easy to answer; the second is a matter for cerebration.

Many nursery rhymes are quite old, indeed most circulated in oral culture long before being written down. According to The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book (1955) by Iona Archibald Opie and Peter Opie over thirty per cent of nursery rhymes predate 1600. Only 2.3 were composed after 1825. The poverty of urban reference to city life should be now be unsurprising since the proportion of the population living in cities and large towns compared to rural locations was a fraction of what it is today. That several refer to larger towns and cities might, from this perspective, actually impress us.

Over the course of time working on this short essay I’ve asked several of my students to name a favorite rhyme. None could do so without some prompting. Humpty Dumpty, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Twinkle, Twinkle and Mary had a Little Lamb all elicited some response. None could recall more than two or three, and strangely, none recalled where they heard the rhymes. “Perhaps in
band?” one speculated. If rhymes are not sung in the nursery anymore, perhaps it’s just as well: the world of the nursery rhyme is a surreal, and occasionally violent one. Oranges and Lemons, otherwise an innocuous one about church bells, ends with these lines: “Here comes a candle to light your to bed,/Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.” Besides, such rhymes in describing agrarian life are inscrutable to most children.

A Visit to Oz

In 1976 to celebrate the Chicago connection to the Oz stories, the city dedicated a lovely little park, Oz Park, to L. Frank Baum’s creative work. It is within half a mile of where I teach in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. In subsequent years, the city installed statues of the four immortal companions, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and Dorothy (and Toto, the dog), at various points throughout the park.

Oz Park is a very jolly affair. The statues are handsome, the landscaping very tasteful with open lawns interspersed among the trees and shrubs. A small area of wild flowers and grasses has been set aside for insects and birds, and to add a natural glamour to the scene. A large playground in the park ensures that in the daylight hours there is always the silver-toned susurrus of children’s jubilation throughout the park. Baum would have liked it, I think, for he was a man of sunny disposition.

On the afternoon when I visited not long ago, a summer rain was spilling down in buckets. The sky was gray, the leaves of the trees were gray and dripping, and the grasses were dark and bedraggled. A few people scurried through the park, their collars turned up. One of them held a newspaper over her head. On the blacktop basketball court, three grown men stripped to the waist tossed the ball about with an air of determined exuberance. From atop a rope in the playground, a young child yelled out to her mother for help.

Read on here 

Awe, despair and the annihilation of nature

Although it can be hard to discern at times, every academic subject is accompanied by a particular mood; for example, patient industry in the case of history, righteous indignation in peace studies, refined querulousness in philosophy, stolid deliberativeness in chemistry, head-spinning giddiness in cosmology, and, at first glance at least, sadness in the case of contemporary environmental science. Although gloominess may be inevitable in a discipline into whose domain falls the triumvirate of anthropogenic climate change, the radical alteration of biogeochemical cycles, and the torquing up of biodiversity loss, nonetheless historically there has been another mood, albeit somewhat muted in recent times, that accompanies the environmental disciplines, and that is awe.

See the full review of The Annihilation of Nature: Human Extinction of Birds and Mammals by Gerardo Ceballos, Anne H. Ehrlich, and Paul R. Ehrlich: here.

Botany and Fantasy

This is generally a truth in fantasy literature: before extravagant quests, before dragons and gold, before rings of power, before strenuous heroism, comes botany. Hobbits farming the Shire, Harry Potter in the greenhouses with Professor Sprout, Ged on the mountains of Gont with Ogion the Silent learning the uses of fourfoil.

Islands as Keystone Locales in Children’s Stories

by
Liam Heneghan

Islands are a type of keystone locale, to adopt the language of the late influential experimental ecologist Robert Paine. They are disproportionately represented in children’s literature and play an undeniable role in shaping the reveries of childhood. But investigations on and of islands were also integral to formulating our contemporary understanding of how species came into being,  More recently, and more ominously, islands have shaped our understanding of how organic forms disappear. Islands are epicenters of  species extinction.

This remarkable convergence of a prevalent theme in children’s literature and in ecological and evolutionary research should not, however, be overly-interpreted.  Islands emerge as important in both literatures  for fairly distinct reasons. No children’s writer, one assumes, writes about islands because they can serve as fruitful experimental replicates for understanding the patterns of nature. Nor might an ecologist chose to study an island because it evokes feelings of comfort, security, and snugness (though she may chose  to study it because an island is beautiful—but this is altogether another matter.)

This caveat against drawing strenuous parallels aside, islands appeal to the the literary and scientific imagination alike because they are discrete, contained, manageable, exotic, quirky; islands are often wild, often subject to large natural forces, and usually navigable. An island pares things down to their essentials; islands clarify.

Ecologists and evolutionists examine islands in order to determine the forces that shape natural communities. But storytellers oftentimes inform us of how natural patterns appear to their protagonists. They describe what it is like for people to encounter islands with all their insular and uncanny strangeness. Islands contain and intensify a plot.

A significant implication of all of this is that in the hands of a skilled storyteller a island story elucidates the island environment. A child may come away from the microcosmic experience of such a book knowing a little more about her relationship with wild forces; knowing more about the world beyond the basic movement of a plot. Stories about islands are a gateway for understanding the nature of islands, the history of our interaction with them and on them. If a child loves an island, the adult she becomes may value them, and by valuing islands she may have a disproportionately beneficent impact upon the world. Islands are stepping stones to the broader world of wild nature.

Ephemeral Islands

by
Liam Heneghan

There is a little tuft of land a few feet oceanwards of Letterkesh beach in Connemara on Ireland’s Atlantic West Coast. You can walk out to it and take a perch on its distant shore; sitting there you can stare out across thousands of miles of open ocean. Exercise a little caution though, for the tide races in quickly here, and during the course of a brief marine reverie the land that was once safely contiguous with the shore becomes an island.

Several of my students who have visited that beach with me over the years have found themselves marooned on this freshly minted islet. And where moments before the surging of the sea calmed the tumult of their mental tides, it’s then they realize that, lost as it is in a private conversation with the moon, the ocean cares not a whit for them. Fortunately, a short paddle in knee-deep waters gets you back to shore and cools any castaway anxiety.

Tim Robinson, that great chronicler of island life along Ireland’s western shores describes his visits to some of these “intermittent-islands,” although the ones he described were of a more substantial variety and at two of them were inhabited. He wrote in Walking out to Islands (1997): “Sometimes one has to wait for the parting of the waters as for the curtain-up of a play, which wakes high expectations.” After this, the timer is set; the duration of your visit is set by the tides.
The shore to which you return from Letterkesh Island is itself, of course, on an island.  This island, Ireland, has itself been separated by an anciently rising post-glacial tide from the neighboring island of Great Britain. There would have been moments when a dithering animal having found itself on Irish soil could have scampered back across the sea to Great Britain and then on, if it cared to, to the continental mainland. Now the ancient land bridges are beneath the waves and the shallow waters are gone. The island of Ireland, in this sense, has been free for an epoch.

Now, if we can continue to stretch out the term ephemeral to encompass a span of more than ten thousand years—a stretch that will give no offense to geologists I suspect, but may offend common sense—then Great Britain is an ephemeral island also having been connected to the continent with land bridges of its own. All of this is from a geo-chronological recent news, since both the land that constitutes Ireland and Great Britain were, at a distant point in the past, undefined regions of a great landmass. The land mass snapped apart to the west as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge opened up the Atlantic. North America and Ireland still drift apart at the rate at which fingernails grow as my old geology professor, Padraig Kennan, once informed a class of us.

One day these nails will be trimmed, and to gravely injury the metaphor, those hands across the ocean will be brought together again.  Ireland, and Great Britain will be reunited. Borderless, indistinguishable from each other, and recognizable only to those with geological-scales memory; that is to say, not recognizable at all.

Awe, Despair, and the Annihilation of Nature

by
Liam Heneghan

Published in TREE June 25, 2016

Although it can be hard to discern at times, every academic subject is accompanied by a particular mood; for example, patient industry in the case of history, righteous indignation in peace studies, refined querulousness in philosophy, stolid deliberativeness in chemistry, head-spinning giddiness in cosmology, and, at first glance at least, sadness in the case of contemporary environmental science. Although gloominess may be inevitable in a discipline into whose domain falls the triumvirate of anthropogenic climate change, the radical alteration of biogeochemical cycles, and the torquing up of biodiversity loss, nonetheless historically there has been another mood, albeit somewhat muted in recent times, that accompanies the environmental disciplines, and that is awe.

See the article here. If you don't have access, let me know and I'm sure I can rustle you up a copy.

Did the Famous Five come from Cork?

by

Liam Heneghan

[Irish Times, Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 06:00]

Bandon-born children’s writer LT Meade’s ‘Four on an Island’ shares similarities with Enid Blyton’s ‘Five on a Treasure Island’, published 50 years later

LT Meade’s novel Four on an Island: A Story of Adventure (1892), now quite rare and seldom read, is sitting in front of me on a cushion in Dublin City Library’s Pearse Street archive. After deliberation about its location in the stacks – the catalogue information was incomplete – the librarian had brought it to me on the cushion, and speculated about my need for gloves while handling the fragile volume (she deemed them unnecessary).

Is this the book that influenced Enid Blyton’s Five on a Treasure Island (1942)?

A few days earlier, arriving back in Dublin from Chicago, where I live, I had picked up Blyton’s novel as part of my research for a book, Beasts at Bedtime, about environmental themes in children’s books.

Although Blyton wrote enthusiastically about nature – her early books include The Bird Book (1926), The Animal Book (1927) and Nature Lessons (1929) – my recollection of Five on a Treasure Island was as a sturdy adventure story rather than a bucolic meditation on kids’ survival on a wild island. It’s a romp where four cousins and their dog gallivant about an island off the Dorset coast, searching for “ingots of gold” and drinking lots of ginger beer.

Island stories are intriguing, as children away from parents’ gaze not only get up to high jinks but are often at the mercy of the wilder forces of nature – their own and environmental.

Blyton’s novel has some pleasant observations on the natural history of Kirrin Island: its rocky inaccessibility, the tameness of its rabbits, the fishing skills of cormorants. I suspect my career choice (a scientist of sorts) derives from a captivation with Uncle Quentin, the irascible scientist, father to Georgina and uncle to her cousins Julian, Dick and Anne, in Blyton’s Famous Five books.

Read on here