Value for Wednesday of Week 17 in the season of Growth

Preserving and Stewarding Nature

Nature cannot protect itself against the ravages of greed.

He who plants a tree plants a hope. [Lucy Larcom]
One planet, one experiment. [Edward O. Wilson]
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It’s not. [Dr. Seuss]

We owe a great debt to those who have worked to preserve the natural environment. The national park movement is only a small part of this effort but its symbolism is important, as is the preservation of large tracts of remaining wilderness.

Real

True Narratives

William Stolzenburg, Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators (Bloomsbury USA, 2008).
Carl Safina, A View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year In an Unnatural World (Henry Holt & Co., 2011).
Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford University Press, 2008).
John Muir, Nature Writings: the story of my boyhood and youth, my first summer in the Sierra, the mountains of California, Stickeen, selected essays (Library of America, 1997).
John Muir, The Eight Wilderness Discovery Books (The Mountaineers Books, 1992).
Douglas Brinkley, Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper, 2009).
Timothy Egan, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt & the Fire That Saved America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009).
Caroline Fraser, Rewilding the World: Dispatches From the Conservation Revolution (Metropolitan Books, 2010).
Tim Flannery, Here On Earth: A Natural History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011).
D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (The University of Chicago Press, 2012); “how the whale has been transformed from a species to slaughter into a species to save.”
William Souder, On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson (Crown Publishers, 2012): a biography of Silent Spring’s author, chronicling how in her later years “she roared at the forces she believed were destroying nature . . .”
John Weller, The Last Ocean: Antarctica’s Ross Sea Project: Saving the Most Pristine Ecosystem on Earth (Rizzoli International Publications (2013): on “sustaining that far-off world that, in turn, sustains us.”
Jack E. Davis, The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea (Liveright Publishing, 2017): a narrative on how the Gulf has become a developer’s paradise, based on a tragic belief in an inexhaustiable bounty of nature.
Dan Egan, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017). “. . . Egan . . . nimbly splices together history, science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative.”
David Owen, Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River (Riverhead Books, 2017): a narrative account of a great river and an enormous dam.
Douglas Brinkley, Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America (Harper/HarperCollins, 2016): FDR as an environmentalist.
Jeff Goodell, The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World (Little, Brown and Company, 2017): on the devastating future effects of climate change, and why we may not avoid them.
Charles C. Mann, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018): “A double biography captures the essential debate about the future of the Earth.”
John Taliaferro, Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and his Restless Drive to Save the West (Liveright, 2019): “ . . . Grinnell took up the cause of all that a hyper-expanding America was destroying: native people, untrammeled land, birds and bison and big bears.”
Tucker Malarkey, Stronghold: One Man’s Quest to Save the World’s Wild Salmon (Spiegel & Grau, 2019): “ . . . those who choose Malarkey’s more ambitious approach will be rewarded with insights into how activism and organizing shape public policy, into how things change.”
Sierra Crane Murdoch, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman’s Search for Justice in Indian Country (Random House, 2020): “Its strength derives not from vast panoramas but from an intimate gaze. By looking at Clarke’s murder through Yellow Bird’s eyes, we get to see the forces that shape and ultimately unite their lives.”

Utilizing nature responsibly:

Michele Owens, Grow the Good Life: Why a Vegetable Garden Will Make You Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise (Rodale, 2011).
Sarah Hayden Reichard, The Conscientious Gardener: Cultivating a Garden Ethic (University of California Press, 2011).
Richard A. Jones and Sharon Sweeney-Lynch, The Beekeeper’s Bible: Bees, Honey, Recipes and Other Home Uses (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2011).
Dean King, Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite (Scribner, 2023), examines “Muir’s relationship and friendship with the editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who brought Muir’s work to the masses.”
Ben Goldfarb, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet (W.W. Norton and Company, 2023): “is a fascinating and compassionate look at the repercussions of roads, inviting us to rethink their design through the relatively new science of road ecology. Roads, Goldfarb writes, are 'not merely a symptom of civilization, but a distinct disease.' He describes road ecology, the study of the impact of roads on plants and animals, as 'empathy manifested as science.'”

On the many threats we face:

Fen Montaigne, Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica (Henry Holt & Company, 2010). “Climate change is destroying an Antarctic penguin colony.”
Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (The Penguin Press, 2012). Colls outlines “the inner workings of one of the Western world’s most significant concentrations of unelected power.”
Eliza Griswold, Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018): “Griswold, a journalist and a poet, paid close attention to a community in southwestern Pennsylvania over the course of seven years to convey its confounding experience with hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process that injects water and chemicals deep into the ground in order to shake loose deposits of natural gas.”
Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future (Crown, 2021): “Electrified Rivers and Other Attempts to Save the Environment”.
Shanna H. Swan, Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, Threatening Sperm Counts, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race (Scribner, 2021): “The Everyday Chemicals That Might Be Leading Us to Our Extinction”.
Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022): Saladino “insists that the resulting loss of crop diversity and dependence on a handful of livestock breeds will leave us, if allowed to continue at full speed, ecologically and culturally destitute.”
Oliver Milman, The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires that Run the World (W.W. Norton & Company, 2022): “When was the last time you had to clean bug splatter from your windshield? This ritual was once an inevitable coda to any long drive. Now, we’re far more likely to watch those same landscapes pass by through unblemished glass, mile after empty mile.”
John Vaillant, Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World (Knopf, 2023) “is a real-life fable about the causes and consequences of climate change. Fort McMurray, with a population of about 90,000, was created so that energy companies could extract bitumen — a sticky black substance that can be converted into synthetic crude oil, diesel and a variety of other petroleum-based products — from the tar sands of northern Alberta.”
Sarah Lohman, Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods (W.W. Norton & Company, 2023), “explores the onetime staples disappearing from our tables.”

Wangari Maathai:

Jeanette Winter, Wangari's Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa (Harcourt Children's Books, 2008).
Wangari Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir (Knopf, 2006).

From the dark side:

Adam Welz, The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023): “Species after species. Biome after biome. Continent after continent. The world that the South African environmental journalist Adam Welz describes is in terminal collapse.”

Technical and Analytical Readings

Dave Foreman, Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century (Island Press, 2004).
Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects (Simon & Schuster, 2019): “ . . . the book is an extended meditation on a question that Sverdrup-Thygeson, an entomologist at Norway’s University of Life Sciences, gets asked all the time: What good are bugs anyway?”

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill: a man devotes himself to the care of wild parrots.

Loss of bee populations:

NATIONAL PARKS:

National parks in the United States, Canada and Mexico:

National parks in Africa:

National parks in South and Central America:

National parks in Europe:

National parks in Asia:

National parks in Australia and New Zealand:

National parks in Pacific island nations:

Caribbean national parks:

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

Novels and stories:

Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander: A Novel (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021): “This is climate fiction at its most urgent and gripping.”
Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun: A Novel (Hogarth, 2021): “imagines a highly imaginable California so ravaged by drought and wildfires that only the rich can afford to survive.”
Matt Bell, Appleseed: A Novel (Custom House, 2021) “employs myth, magic and science to give a damning account of the narrative of American exceptionalism and the relentless post-conquest exploitation of this country’s vast natural resources.”
Richard Powers, Bewilderment: A Novel (W.W.Norton & Company, 2021): “It’s a book about ecological salvation that somehow makes you want to flick an otter on the back of the head, for no good reason at all.”
Stephen Markley, The Deluge: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2023): “Confronts the Scale and Gravity of Climate Change”.
Alexa Hyde, The Last Catastrophe: Stories (Vintage, 2023): “Each story confronts the climate crisis by way of characters who are attempting to either accept or flee from the consequences of human destruction. Neither path, of course, will save them.”
C. Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2023): “A couple of summers ago, as I drove through Oregon amid a record heat wave across the Pacific Northwest, I pulled over at a trailhead to eat a plum. Wildfires were burning, temperatures hovered around 100 degrees and the pine forest in front of me had been rendered ghostly, the edges of everything lost and faintly browned by smoke. It was a shock, then, to bite into the fruit and taste its disruptive sweetness, how fresh and pure it was in spite of the surroundings. It was the sort of thing that tears the mind and body in opposite directions — and as we face down a moment increasingly dominated by environmental crisis, this may be the ambivalent flavor of our future: sweet and bitter and full of contradiction.”

Poetry

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Small Island, Big Song is a group of musicians from sixteen island nations of the Pacific and Indian oceans. They focus on preserving nature for everyone.

“Senasenai a Mupaljat” (small island mix) (2018) (74’)
“Our Island” (2022) (68’)

Compositions:

Neil Rolnick, “Oceans Eat Cities” (2015) (approx. 16-17’), about global warming
Gregory Spears, “The Tower and the Garden” (2018) (approx. 35’), a “four-movement setting of poems by Keith Garebian, Denise Levertov and Thomas Merton exploring religion, technology and conservation”
Martin Bresnick, String Quartet No. 4, “The Planet on the Table” (2019) (approx. 32’) is “inspired—instigated is perhaps a better word—by the poetry of Wallace Stevens”; along the same lines is Bresnick’s “Bird As Prophet” (1999) (approx. 13’).
Steven Stucky, “Silent Spring” (2011) (approx. 17’) is inspired by Rachel Carson’s book.
John Luther Adams, Inuksuit (2009) (approx. 60’) “is inspired by the stone sentinels constructed over the centuries by the Inuit in the windswept expanses of the Arctic. The word ‘Inuksuit’ translates literally: ‘to act in the capacity of the human’. This work is haunted by the vision of the melting of the polar ice, the rising of the seas, and what may remain of humanity's presence after the waters recede.” [Adams]
Ross Edwards, Symphony No. 3, “Mater Magna” (2001) (approx. 24’): Edwards describes the work as “a meditation on the need for ecological re-balancing, using as a symbol, the Earth Mother, ‘Mater Magna’, the vital female force in nature. It is about healing and ultimately achieving wholeness.”
Brian Field, Three Passions for our Tortured Planet (2021) (approx. 12-13’): the three passions, all related to climate change, are fire (wildfires destroying forests), glaciers (melting), and winds (of increasing intensity, such as hurricanes and typhoons).
Christopher Cerrone, Beaufort Scales (2022) (approx. 35’) was inspired by the composer’s experience with a wildfire, who explains: “Although wildfires are a natural occurrence, they have unfortunately become a frequent, annual occurrence . . . because of climate change. I knew after that experience that I had to find a way to artistically document this experience.”
Stacy Garrop, Terra Nostra (2015) (approx. 66’) “. . . explores the relationship between humanity and Earth, and how humankind can re-establish a harmonious balance.” Here are the composer’s program notes.
Jake Runestad, Earth Symphony (2021) (approx. 32-35’) (text & score): “The work imagines Earth’s hope for humanity, her discovery of its power, her ruination at its hands, her lament at its loss, and her recovery. By anthropomorphizing Earth herself, ‘Earth Symphony’ enables entry into our own ecological shame, guilt, responsibility, potential, and redemption, all from a wide-angled, time-telescoped lens, thereby asking our most immediately pressing environmental questions in an entirely new way.”
Noah Max, String Quartet No. 1, Op. 25, “The Man Who Planted Trees” (2020) (approx. 24’) is drawn from Jean Giono’s story by the same title (here is an illustrated version).
Richard Blackford, Cello Concerto, “The Recovery of Paradise” (2024) (approx. 30’) is “(l)argely inspired by natural (climate change-induced) wildfires and the devastation they leave in their wake . . .”
Christopher Stark, Fire Ecologies (2021) (approx. 50’) is “an expansive paean to the natural world as it faces crisis”, and “a Tender Meditation on Ecology”.

Albums:

Bruce Wolosoff has composed works for cello and piano, which he presents on the album “Paradise Found” (2022) (56’), with cellist Sara Sant’Ambrogio. The main works are Cello Sonata No. 1, “Paradise Found” (approx. 23’), evoking the experience of witnessing nature in its splendid beauty; the second is Cello Sonata No. 2, “Requiem for the Planet” (approx. 21’).
Yolanda Kondonassis describes her solo harp album, “Five Minutes for Earth” (2022) (80’), as “a project that both celebrates our planet and illuminates the challenge to preserve it. In 2020, I asked each of the composers featured in this collection if they would consider contributing a work for solo harp of approximately five minutes in length that expresses a powerful experience inspired by Earth in one of its many conditions or atmospheres.”
Renée Fleming, “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene” (2021) (63’): “ . . . Fleming reflects on the climate crisis, and the urgent threat to the natural world, and, implicitly, to our existence.” [Neil Fisher, Gramophone magazine, November 2021 issue, p. 77.]
Ros Bandt, “Medusa Dreaming” (2021) (57’), “a site-specific water symphony”, presents “a sonic archaeology of the site and a desperate plea for international water care in the time of global collapse”.
Iro Haarla Electric Ensemble, “What We Will Leave Behind” (2021) (54’)
Kaleiido, “Elements” (2022) (46’): in four parts – sky, land, ocean and ember – like a prayer for Earth
Sushma Soma, “Home” (2022) (35’), with tracks about consumerism and elephant hunting
Yarn/Wire, “Little Jimmy” (2022) (47’): the album contains three compositions by Andrew McIntosh. “Little Jimmy incorporates field recordings of a wilderness that has since been decimated by wildfire, creating a unique autobiographical and climatological context for the piece while unintentionally archiving a natural setting that no longer exists. The sonic landscapes of the forest, mountains, wind, and birds are echoed by Yarn/Wire’s soundscape of piano and percussion, inviting meditative reflections about humans and nature that both connect and contrast the two worlds.”
Christopher Tin, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra & Voces8, “The Lost Birds: An Extinction Elegy” (2022) (46’) is a mournful tribute to species made extinct. In the liner notes to the album, Tin writes: “It’s a celebration of their beauty—as symbols of hope, peace, and renewal. But it also mourns their absence—through the lonely branches of a tree, or the fading echoes of distant bird cries.”
Allison Miller, “Rivers in Our Veins” (2023) (67’): “. . . the album is a 12-song cycle inspired by the many rivers and watersheds of the United States, as well as the organizations devoted to protecting those vital resources.”
Sam Lee, “songdreaming” (2024) (48’) “is in essence a record about country walks and the mystical power of landscape suffused with a deep belief that music might begin the process of healing the planet at a time of ecological apocalypse.”
Jake Blount & Mali Obomsawin, “symbiont” (2024) (37’) confronts “the threat posed by climate change and social injustice by combining source material ranging from shape-note hymns, traditional spirituals, slave songs and First Nations’ anthems to sequenced beats, synthesized drones, fuzzy electric guitars and gourd banjos.”

Music: songs and other short pieces

Nawang Khechog, “Caring for Our Mother Nature”
Michael Jackson, “Earth Song” (lyrics)
Sting, “Fragile” (lyrics)

Visual Arts

John Constable, Golding Constable's Flower Garden (1815)
John Constable, Golding Constable's Kitchen Garden (1815)
John Constable, Wivenhoe Park (1816)
Edward Landseer, Sanctuary (1829)
Nikolay Gay, Vineyard at Vico (1858)

Film and Stage

Mountain Patrol: Kekexili: a group of Tibetans isolate themselveson a mountain four miles above sea level to protect the endangered Tibetan antelope from poachers, who have no qualms about killing the animals or the men
Avatar: a soldier loses function in his legs and undertakes a missionin an alien world, only to discover that he belongs in spirit with the nature-worshiping “aliens”; the film’s celebration of violence mars and blurs the message, though.
Walkabout: on the “contrast between civilization and man’s more natural states”; “a statement on the exploitation of the natural world and native cultures by European civilization”
First Reformed: the film’s inner meaning is enigmatic, even to the filmmaker but the message on climate change cannot be ignored.

This is Our Story

Humanity United in Action,
Driven By Love and Compassion,
Informed by Science and Reason.

This Is Our Story

A religion of values and Ethics, driven by love and compassion, informed by science and reason.

A RELIGION OF VALUES

WHAT YOU WILL SEE HERE

AI buffer

ILLUSTRATIONS

BEING EMPATHETIC

Wish Fulfillment

Hopelessness

Living in Dignity

Anxiety

Cycles – Seasons

Mutuality – Reciprocity – Cooperation