🌱Fieldnotes In EcoWriting & Environmental Communication
A review of James Lovelock's new book Novacene + an interview with science writer Ed Yong + 'Blackbird' Sung In Mi'kmaq + More!
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a bi-weekly digest by me, Gavin Lamb, about news, ideas, research, and tips in environmental communication. In today’s digest, I share some things I’ve been thinking about this week. If you’re new, welcome! You can read more about why I started Wild Ones here. Sign up here to get these digests in your inbox:
📚 What I’m reading
Our Cyborg Progeny: a review of ‘Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence’
by James Lovelock (2020). By Meehan Crist in the London Review of Books. Meehan Crist is a writer-in-residence in biological sciences at Columbia University.
You might know of James Lovelock (b .1919) who, in the 1970s, collaborated with the evolutionary theorist and biologist Lynn Margulis to formulate the Gaia hypothesis which “proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.”
Lovelock’s new book Novacene continues to develop the Gaia hypothesis in rather strange directions. Or as Crist puts it, “this book is a bit nuts.” But Crist doesn’t just critique Lovelock’s book. Instead, she places the particular climate story Lovelock tells within a rich history of earth science and the “sometimes vitriolic culture war…waged along the continuum between hope and despair.”
Capturing the theme of the book, Crist writes: “Novacene is about what is left once you have given up on humanity’s ability to curb a runaway climate, but you still have faith in the future of life on Earth.” While deeply critical of the book, Crist says that “A charitable reading of Novacene is that it represents one man’s attempt to make meaning out of his life in the face of a deeply held belief that humanity is doomed. It is, in essence, a rejection of nihilism.”
The environmental historian, Daegen Miller, tweeted about Crist’s review of Lovelock’s Novacene, succinctly summarizing why it’s a great example of environmental writing at the nexus of science, politics, and the climate crisis:
“This review essay by @meehancrist for @LRB on Gaia & James Lovelock's newest book is great: critical but generous, doesn't let Lovelock off the hook but also doesn't caricature, and richly steeped in intellectual history of science.”
If you’re interested in more great climate writing and storytelling, I recommend checking out Meehan Crist’s other work, like this or this. She is also a founding member of NeuWrite, “an international network of scientists, writers, radio producers, filmmakers, and artists” whose “mission is to develop novel strategies for communicating science to general audiences.”
🎧 What I’m listening to
Longform Podcast: An interview with Ed Yong. Yong is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers science. In this podcast, he talks mostly about writing about the pandemic. In 2016, he published the book “I Contain Multitudes,” a book about the incredible partnerships between animals and microbes. I’m especially looking forward to his forthcoming book: An Immense World: A journey through the animal kingdom's extraordinary senses.
“Normally when I write things that are about a pressing societal issue, those pieces feel like they’re about things that need to get solved in timeframes of, say, months or years. ... But now I’m writing pieces that are affecting people’s choices and lives, and hopefully the direction of the entire country, on an hourly basis. The changes I hope to see, I hope to see immediately. Like right now. And that does create a massive sense of urgency, a sense of pressing, incredibly high stakes. And it’s a burden.”
👀 What I’m watching
'Blackbird' Sung In Mi'kmaq Seeks To Raise Awareness Of Indigenous Language
“Sixteen-year-old high school student Emma Stevens sang a version of The Beatles' "Blackbird" in her native Mi'kmaq, to raise awareness of Indigenous languages and culture. Here & Now's Robin Young speaks to Stevens and Katani Julian, who translated the song, about the experience.” In an interview with Stevens and Katani, the host of WBUR Boston asks Katani about translating the song from English into Mi'kmaq:
“You know, Paul McCartney’’s such a brilliant songwriter, and of course, it has impact and deep meaning already. But then to add the icing on the cake, and to have it done in our Mi'kmaq language is just spectacular, it’s just wonderful to hear. Mi'kmaq is full of emotions when it’s spoken. When we speak to each other there’s a lot of emotion that’s conveyed in the words. So it just took that song to an extra height and level of emotion. And a lot of people who understand and speak Mi'kmaq were brought to tears when they heard the song.”
Listening to the interview with Stevens and Katani Julian, we also learn that Paul McCartney’s Blackbird was inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, and in particular The Little Rock 9, a group of nine black students who enrolled in the all-white Little Rock Central High School in 1957 following the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. the Board of Education decision that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Here’s a video of Paul McCartney at a concert in Little Rock sharing this story before playing Blackbird for the audience.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise
Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life, you were only waiting for this moment to be free
Blackbird fly
Blackbird fly, into the light of a dark black night– Lyrics from ‘Blackbird,’ By Paul McCartney
🔍 EcoWriting Tool I’m exploring
Ed Yong’s writing advice to new science writers and journalists. I also wrote a bit more about drawing on Ed Yong’s advice in my own ecowriting. You can read it here.
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“Lurking in the background of [James Lovelock’s] cybernetic techno-fantasy is a naturalisation of the bloodletting that has occurred throughout human history, and which threatens to accelerate in a not so distant future shaped by the climate crisis. Lovelock seems to accept the violence of climate change and of the policies we use to manage our relationship with Earth as part of an inexorably unfolding natural process. Framing history in this way renders events inevitable and removes the possibility (and burden) of considering the suffering that a relatively small proportion of humanity has inflicted on the planet and on the rest of us. This framing leaves no room for justice. You can ignore politics and power because, hey, it’s nature.”
– Meehan Crist, on Lovelock’s framing of history in her review of ‘Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence’ by James Lovelock (2020), in the London Review of Books.
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