From the TV remote to the group text to the ghoulish glow of the tablet I should have stowed before curling into bed: The world’s abiding awfulness is always just a click away. It’s as omnipresent as the WiFi it rides like a jet stream. It leaps between fellow citizens—a furrowed brow here, passing comment there—like a pathogen, a mood.

You’re aware, I presume, of what constitutes this awfulness? Of the climate crisis, the democracy crisis, and the election that’ll put both on the line. Of rising income inequality and eroding reproductive rights. Of wars. Of everything that’s overwhelming. How it’s everywhere all at once.

How does one cope? There’s drinking (I’ve tried it) and meditation (sleep-inducing), activism (good, if exhausting) and full-on fetal surrender (that didn’t work in 2020). Lately, though, I’ve found a better treatment, something portable, something free: I think about the Earth’s geological timeline and my own tiny lifespan. I zoom out from the crises that define my era and linger on the cataclysms of the past: the dinosaur-annihilating asteroid, the reshuffling of the continents, the first human to speak.

There, in the company of cosmic devastation, today’s headlines recede. Our global sauna cools when I picture woolly mammoths trudging across my driveway. I close my eyes a little longer, and a glacier glows in a living room where the TV speaks of war. I can even forget the faces of this nation’s villains by imagining the molten lava that once swirled across the Earth. They are ash, and I am ash, and our awful era floats away like smoke.

I like how I can access these worlds while buying groceries, commuting, or writing an email—channeling an apocalyptic Walter Mitty as I reimagine geologies where people disappear. It helps to have a reference for each scenario: Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, notes from an exhibit on fossils, a high school physics textbook. The latter led me to intergalactic finales, star systems collapsing like constellated Fourth of Julys.

Is this a by-product of an ostrich-like retreat into research, reading, and the mind? Perhaps. Let the record show, though, that I still volunteer and vote. As a poet who believes, as Whitman did before me, that poets should be their “age transfigured,” this is how I transfigure mine.

In my latest poetry collection, When the Earth Flies Into the Sun, I often linger on planetary upheavals, sussing out the solace and sublimity that such events allow. (The sublime, Rainer Maria Rilke tells us, is something so beautiful it threatens to destroy us.) Each poem, I hope, distills my peculiar treatment into a tincture. They’re aspirin. They’re escape.

That’s how I found myself imagining, in the book’s title poem, what happens when the Earth finally flies into the sun. The answer: “it will be morning every day.” Other scenarios followed on the page after a short audition in the mind. In a poem first published here at Zócalo Public Square, I write to the first human speaker. In a sequel, I address the last human on earth:

Your end in the end          will come before dawn:

the sun’s just a sun—       your shadow alone will know            that you’re gone.

In the undiscoverable history of human figuration, the sun, I like to think, precipitated our first metaphors. Our shadows, by the same logic, the first personification. As a writer always working to coin new metaphors, I take a perverse pleasure in imagining their extinction. The sun, once again, is “just a sun.” What else tells us that the Anthropocene has come to an end?

Imagination is an asset at such moments of crisis. There’s no hope without it, nor any social justice. Whoever endeavors to change the world must first imagine it anew. But it’s also a balm when those crises overwhelm. In 1942, as the magnitude of awfulness exceeded even our own, the poet Wallace Stevens described his vocation like so: “to help people to live their lives.” Poets achieved this by making their imagination “the light in the minds of others.”

In the oubliette of my insomnia or the shudder of another mass shooting, I try to do the same. I hunch over my desk; I scratch a few lines into my notebook. If I’m lucky, imagination fills a poem’s paper lantern, and—years later, revisions complete—it floats into the world. If I’m not, I can seek solace in one of the many poetry books scattered across the room.

I’m not alone in this second, readerly desire, as recent catastrophes attest. In the months following the attacks of 9/11, W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” attained a sort of pre-viral fame. It helped that the poem opened its lament where so many Americans ended their day: at a bar feeling “[u]ncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” The repugnant Muslim travel ban of 2017 returned many readers to Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus.” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine compelled me to recite Adam Zagajewski’s “To Go to Lvov” to my students.

These poems provide a necessary reassurance. That the world has broken before. That we’ve jigsawed it back into shape. Poetry’s marginality—roughly 12% of Americans read it—also suits it to moments of crisis. Now is the time for elevated speech, some part of the populace concedes, because we’ve already tried everything else. Devices, drink, distraction, debate: None provide, as poems do, the hand at the small of one’s back, the rain that cools in the fall.

I used to think that poets had superpowers. That they could lick a finger, hold it up to the wind, and tune into the suffering of the world. But I have come to believe that we’re all capable of registering the world’s suffering. The question that lingers is what to do next. For me, this entails imagining geological sweeps of rock and species, stars and shore. These provide me—and, I hope, whatever readers join me—a detached sort of peace.

The post When the World Seems Awful, I Submerge Myself in the Vastness of the Universe appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Driving through Iceland, the foreboding moonscape of the lava fields gives way to the mysteries of mist-shrouded mountain peaks. It is a place where the tumbling beauty of waterfalls spills into volcanic ash beds that seem devoid of life. For someone who comes from the forested, lake-filled, and (largely) flat land of Minnesota, Iceland’s landscape is simultaneously enchanting and alienating. I feel this tension in my body, and the push-and-pull of the place brings me to a minor epiphany about systems that presume progress is achieved through efficiency.

The metric system, used in most countries around the world, is logical and reasonable— but it exists outside our bodies. My experience in Iceland served to remind me how we can measure landscapes against our expectations, our bodies, and our imaginations in ways that may not be logical but use the things that make us human.

Traversing Iceland’s Ring Road in a 1999 Toyota, a GPS-free vehicle, required someone like myself to adjust from familiar miles to strange kilometers. Whenever a road sign reported that some Icelandic town with a mile-long and largely unpronounceable name was 27 kms distant, I would quickly do the mental math—1 mile = 1.6 kms, and so 27 kilometers divided by 1.6 = 17 or so miles—to get an idea of how much time it would take me to get there.

This experience of calculating the strange into the familiar will no doubt be discounted by many who hold that if only I had been born in a forward-thinking country that had long ago adopted the metric system, I would not have to apply a formula memorized in the sixth grade. That perhaps is true, but my objection to the metric system is not rooted in the accident of my birth in the United States. Rather, my objection is to the way it dehumanizes the way we interact with our landscapes.

The metric system was developed in late 18th-century France as a way to standardize measurement; industrialization and European colonialism quickly spread it across the world. When viewed as a component of the universal progress these economic and sociopolitical orders promised, the metric system makes the United States (one of only three nations in the world that has not gone metric) look like it is out of step with prevailing standards. It is, of course. I just wonder what is lost when our forward-thinking peers make efficiency and (seeming) progress the best gauges of how to fit in with our planet. (I’m certain that U.S. culture has not avoided the metric system out of concern for the way it undercuts our humanity.)

The meter was delineated by measuring the distance from the Equator to the North Pole, then dividing that by 10 million. In this way, we measure Earth abstractly, from above (as it were), and then decimalize the result to arrive at the ideal unit of measure. It is logical, perhaps, but it is alienating; the earth becomes an object of measurement, not a living home. Though the metric is a system based on the dimensions of Earth, it abstracts us from the earth, from our familiar landscapes, by making us quantify them from outside of ourselves.

I got to thinking about the metric as an alienating form of measurement as I cartwheeled through the mental gymnastics of making kilometers into miles. But it really hit me when I tried to convey to a couple of flatlanders back home how strange it was to see the sun still in the sky above Selfoss at 10:30 p.m. (In Minnesota, even at the height of summer, the sun barely makes it past 9 p.m. before setting.) To convey the strangeness of being in a fully sunlit room that late in the evening, I described to my friends in an email that the sun was still “three fingers above the horizon.” Three fingers, not .048 meters or 4.8 centimeters.

Author’s thumb. Courtesy of Carter Meland

Driving around the volcanic highlands of Snæfellsnes the next day, I thought about this finger measurement (imagining that it was probably a familiar form of measurement to the Norse longboaters who settled Iceland) and got to thinking about the inch. I knew it had long ago been defined as being the width of a man’s thumb at the base of the nail. Etymologically the word “inch” comes from the Latin uncia, which means the one-twelfth part of something, and so it is definitely not a decimalized form of anything. The inch—the width of a thumb—is one-twelfth of a foot. A foot is both that strange looking appendage at the far end of your leg and a way to measure length—and you can extend the foot measurement into a yard, which is thought to have derived from the length of a stride, otherwise known as what you do with your feet as you move through an earthly landscape. Our bodies help us understand the landscapes we inch our ways through, foot by foot and stride by stride; we take their measure just by walking through them.

On the other—um, yeah—hand, a meter is a mental construct. It is logically meaningful in the way so many Enlightenment ideals are, and it takes the humanity out of the task of taking measure of our world. Such disembodied ideals may have made it easier for Enlightenment-oriented thinkers and societies to subjugate people whose humanity, whose metrics, differed from theirs.

My fingers were then meaningful for making sense of this strange place, Iceland. My body, rather than some abstract unit of measure, gave meaning to the relationship of the sun to the horizon, and the three of us—self, sun, and horizon—were brought together. An inch, a finger, or a foot make our body a part of the landscape, embedding us in place, a fitting way to measure our home, the earth.

Standing in Iceland, the blast of a geyser catches my eye, the hot steam cools into a heavy mist that touches my skin if I stand downwind of it, and the sulfuric stink of the volcanic action that drove the geyser’s explosion tangs my nose. I am awed by the sight, rinsed with the mist, and repulsed by the odor all at the same time. But my foot grounds my body in the environment in a way that a meter could not. Everywhere, a meter reduces our shared home to data; everywhere, the sun three fingers above the horizon elevates it to poetry.

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Even a generation ago, before the internet reached everyone, “one world” was an expression of idealism, signifying easy and carefree participation in a panoply of world cultures, all accessible by way of a flight, a screen, or a just-in-time supply chain. Think, for instance, of the Western vogue for so-called “world music” with its spirit of sentimental and nebulous togetherness: “One world is enough for all of us” went the refrain in Sting’s “One World (Not Three)” on his 1986 live album, Bring on the Night.

But now that the bloom is off globalization’s rose—world connection is just as likely to spur thoughts of climate change, inequality, or the spread of COVID-19 as global fellowship—we would do well to recall the longer, lost history of “one world.” Whether we know it or not, any modern use of the phrase, in both its hopeful and fearful senses, is indebted to the Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie and his 1943 bestseller, One World.

If you’ve heard of Willkie, it’s likely because of his 1940 campaign for president against Franklin Roosevelt. A relative newcomer to politics, Willkie was drafted by business-friendly Republicans because he opposed FDR’s New Deal. He is often celebrated for his decision not to side with the so-called “isolationists” in the Republican Party—some of whom claimed the badge of “America First!” to resist American involvement in another European war.

Willkie is also revered for what happened after he lost that election. Instead of remaining in opposition, Willkie stepped up to support Lend-Lease, the President’s effort to send American war supplies to Britain. Willkie, it is said, helped FDR prepare America to save the world from fascism.

These stories, while powerful, actually slight Willkie’s true significance. He should be remembered more for his particular vision of “one world.” Specifically, Willkie argued for “one world” as a global call for a world free of the racism and imperial exploitation fostered by nationalism. His ideals may appear naïve at first, but they might give us some idea of what a visionary globalism is still good for in a time of resurgent nationalism and planetary fragility.

Willkie was not the first to use the phrase “one world.” Writers and thinkers had previously used it to describe how the steamship, the telegraph, the telephone, the airplane, the stock market, and the radio all shrank space and sped up time, bringing far-flung places and cultures into greater contact.

These forces unleashed chaos and disintegration, too, as war and conquest swept the globe. Nationalist leaders rose, offering stories of shared purpose and common destiny as balms for disruption. But nationalism marked territory with myths of blood and belonging, sparking competition for patches of soil on the map.

By contrast, internationalists countered nationalism’s primal pull with rational plans for cooperation between states. Fashioned properly, internationalism would ride the new networks of global communication and finance and transportation. It would have to, the internationalists said, or the future held only war and privation.

Willkie became an internationalist early on. Born in 1892 in Indiana, his first political inspiration was President Woodrow Wilson, hero to many internationalists for his call to “make the world safe for democracy” and his advocacy of the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations. Much to Willkie’s dismay, however, many Americans, bitter about World War I, rejected the League, and the U.S. never joined.

As he built a career as a lawyer for the power industry and activist in the Democratic Party (he wouldn’t switch parties until just before the 1940 campaign), Willkie hoped for an American internationalist revival on more equitable terms than even Wilson, a racist and imperialist, imagined. But as the Great Depression deepened and war spread in Asia and Europe again, Willkie and other internationalists believed that nobody could now doubt that full international cooperation was necessary—and inevitable. In that spirit, Willkie supported Lend Lease in 1940. He also visited Britain in 1941, during the last days of the Blitz, and his genial, iconoclastic personality did much to lift spirits there.

By the late summer of 1942, the U.S. was in the fight, but active only in the Pacific. While the U.S. supplied aid and munitions to European Allies, the Nazis held Western Europe and occupied great swathes of Russia. Several American journalists working in Kuibyshev—the Soviets wartime capital—cabled Willkie to suggest he visit the beleaguered country to boost morale. Working with Roosevelt again, Willkie planned a much bigger undertaking: a closely watched, seven-week, 31,000-mile flying journey around the world that would take him to 13 countries on five continents.

The journey followed recently opened and occasionally un-scouted air lanes over Africa, the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and China, a route that skirted Axis-held territory—well within range of enemy aircraft—and brought Willkie face to face with everyone from Soviet factory workers and Siberian peasants to Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-Shek, and Charles de Gaulle. Millions followed his route via the papers and newsreels, discovering a world that had become, as Willkie would later put it, “small and completely interdependent.”

FDR saw the trip as a fact-finding mission and a morale-building effort. But his former opponent made it much more than that. Across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, Willkie discovered, the war was not just a struggle against Nazi fascism and Japanese militarism, but potentially a colossal turning point in world history. A whole generation of anti-imperial nationalists saw a war fought for democracy and freedom as a chance to persuade the great European empires to finally relinquish their hold on the globe.

This meant the U.S. was at a crossroads too. America would become the next great power—but what kind of power would it choose to become?

Here, in the midst of worldwide terror and destruction, Willkie discovered a fleeting opportunity: The United States had a chance to lead the planet to a new era of cooperation—but only if it would truly embrace its own ideals in an effort to end colonialism and colonial thinking. To win a lasting peace and a future of global cooperation, Willkie came to believe, Americans would have to accept a more cooperative relationship with the rest of the planet.

“There are no distant points in the world any longer,” Willkie announced in his book describing his journey. The volume was initially going to be called One War, One Peace, One World, but Willkie soon realized that the last third said it all. A planet shrunk by aviation and total war was unified by technology, and could be brought together politically, too, if only Americans would put in the work. The U.S., he argued, had to forego “narrow nationalism” or the “international imperialism” practiced by the European powers. Americans had to choose instead to support “equality of opportunity for every race and every nation.”

Millions read One World—some called it the fastest-selling book in American history to date—even though it was critical of America and the West. In fact, one of the chief lessons of his trip, he argued was that the linked forces of racism and empire were hampering the Allied war effort. “The moral atmosphere in which the white race lives is changing,” he wrote, conveying the demands he heard across the globe. People everywhere were “no longer willing to be Eastern slaves for Western profits. The big house on the hill surrounded by mud huts has lost its awesome charm.”

Americans were not exempt, either. The U.S., Willkie wrote, had long “practiced inside our own boundaries something that amounts to race imperialism.”

However, Willkie was less critical of American imperial power. In general, he saw the United States as crucial to a global solution rather than part of the problem, a perspective that suggests how Americans tended to discount the negative impact of their power abroad. The idea of “one world” would become broadly influential during the war years, but a current of resilient nationalism would eventually undermine his hopes. Willkie’s bid for the 1944 Republican nomination never got off the ground. He argued for a fully democratic structure for the United Nations—one that would give smaller nations equal power and open a clear path to freedom for colonized countries. But FDR’s preferred plan—dominance by the Great Powers in the Security Council—won the day.

Tragically, Willkie never saw the U.N. convene. He died, unexpectedly, in October 1944 at only 52.

Before long, “Willkie” began to seem like a name from another time. One World has often been recalled as an oddity of wartime life, a naïve statement of wishful global harmony, and Willkie was remembered as an almost-President who helped Roosevelt save democracy in 1940. But if Willkie’s own name has faded, the phrase he made popular lived on, inspiring a host of global visions down to our own time.

“One world or none!” declared pacifists, world government advocates, and anti-nuclear activists in the 1940s and ’50s. Anti-imperialists like Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India claimed it as a slogan, too, as they harnessed the U.N. to help usher colonialism off the world stage. Later it resurfaced as an environmentalist credo, echoed by the early astronauts who first saw the Earth from space. “When you’re finally up at the moon looking back at the Earth,” Apollo 8’s Frank Borman mused in 1968, “all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people.”

With the precipitous globalization of the 1980s and ’90s the idea came rushing back. Global capitalism, some argued, was leveling barriers to opportunity everywhere. But this new “one world” felt like a threat to others. One World, Ready or Not, announced journalist William Greider in his 1997 expose of the borderless world of free trade and finance. Greider observed that Willkie’s idealism had been replaced by “the manic logic of global capitalism,” which would doom local industry and community and drive inequality to new heights.

Since then, of course, the perils of “one world” have swamped any lingering promise the phrase once held. Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center, the resulting “war on terror,” the financial crisis of 2008, the refugee crisis, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic: all spring from the precarious state of a planet in which all of us are inescapably joined in a web of communications, market transactions, greenhouse gasses, possible pandemics, migration routes, and interlocking political alliances, resentments, and inequalities. Globalization, we are told, continues to lift more people out of poverty than it immiserates, but that’s statistics, not perception.

When another political outsider—like Willkie, a former Democrat from the world of business—took the presidency by storm in 2016, he promised to turn back the clock, invoking the name of his predecessor’s bête noir. “From this moment on,” Donald Trump declared at his inauguration, “it’s going to be ‘America First.’”

Trump is not alone, of course. The worldwide retreat into nationalism is spurred by both inequality and xenophobia. And it denies what Willkie—were he still with us—would surely say: We are one world made out of many creatures—human and nonhuman—living together on a single fragile earth.

The post When Americans Fell in Love With the Ideal of ‘One World’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m what we call an “eclipse chaser.” It’s a self-appointed title. On the website I run, eclipse-chasers.com, I host a log where people from all over the world can record how many they’ve seen. The highest right now is 33 total eclipses. It’s a place online for people like me, people who spend all their vacation time and travel money to observe these indescribable phenomena.

I spend the day before, and then the morning of an eclipse, in nervous anticipation. Every cloud could be an advance scout for an army coming over the horizon. Wind changes are a big deal. Small alterations in humidity are noted. Should we move? Should we set up here? Will it be clear?

In the minute before first contact—that moment when the moon touches the solar disk for the first time—my anticipation grows. Then comes that first little dark edge across the sun. That little bite confirms that the numbers are right. Relief.

The author on his first eclipse-watching trip in 1972. Photo courtesy of Bill Kramer.

Slowly the moon covers the last of the bright sun and the light falls off quickly. Sunset colors fall across any clouds that may be in the sky. If you are looking in the right direction and have a great view you might even see the moon’s shadow racing across the land towards you. Or you might see shadow bands moving across a flat area like vaporous ghosts making the light shiver around them.

And then the eclipse goes total. It’s dark yet not pitch-black. The horizon glows. Bright stars appear. The sky takes on a deep blue color. And where the sun once shone is a black circle surrounded by a shiny white corona—the circle of solar gases. It’s a magical eye floating in the sky. Streamers of light extend like glowing hairs. Time seems to flip into hyper-drive. Before you know it the eclipse is ending.

The finale is the best part. It only lasts a few seconds. The solar disk peeks out. The light from that one speck of sunlight quickly overwhelms the corona. The effect is called the diamond ring because that is what it looks like.

I don’t have a favorite eclipse among the many I’ve seen. All of them are great. And all of them are different. An eclipse chaser can look at a photograph and say, for example, oh yeah, that’s from the 1983 eclipse in Indonesia. Somebody might ask how I know. Well, because each corona is different. The corona is constantly changing.

Most eclipse chasers will tell you their first eclipse was the best. I was in elementary school when I developed an interest in astronomy and I got involved with the local astronomy club at Youngstown State University. In 1970 some members came back from an eclipse on the eastern coast of the United States, talking about what a great experience they’d had. The director of the planetarium said that he was organizing a cruise to intercept the next total eclipse, in 1972, when I would be 13 years old. I got down on both knees and begged my parents. They agreed and my parents and I were among the first ones to sign up.

We saw that eclipse in middle of the North Atlantic. In 1973 we went to Western Africa to see the next one. Then we didn’t see another one until 1980.

An image of totality from the author’s first eclipse-watching trip in 1972. Photo courtesy of Bill Kramer.

I was lucky in my profession: I majored in computer science, graduated from an engineering school with a computer science and engineering degree, and started my own business in 1985. So I had some flexibility. Whenever it was economically feasible I’d go to see the next eclipse. When my wife and I were first getting serious she found a book at my place—a NASA publication of upcoming eclipses, with a sticker over the front that said “Bill’s travel guide.” She had to know how it was.

So I kept chasing eclipses with my wife, and when we had kids we dragged them along. This summer our grandson, who was just born in November, is going to see the eclipse. So it’s a three-, four-generation tradition.

I particularly remember the eclipse of ’99. When we got back from our trip, we found out my dad had died the day after. I didn’t get a chance to tell him how it had gone and I felt bad about that. It’s one of those things that hits you. So my wife and I decided then, hey, let’s try to see all of the eclipses from now on.

I’ve missed a few, though. Sometimes it’s a question of weather. In 2015 there was an eclipse in March visible from Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago. I skipped that one. Many of those who went saw their cameras malfunction due to the low temperatures.

I’ve never been clouded out and been unable to see an eclipse. Germany in 1999 was the closest I’ve come to that, but it’s never actually happened. Knock wood.

Probably the most difficult eclipse trip I’ve been on was in Zimbabwe. We landed in Harare, missed our connecting flight to Bulawayo, and had to rent a bus for a group of 20—on a Sunday morning—then switch to a caravan of smaller vehicles. My wife and I rode in the luggage car, which broke down a couple of times before we reached the lodge after dark. All this after an overnight flight from London. The next day every vehicle in our caravan broke down. We ended up observing the eclipse at a road rest area—that is, a giant baobab tree. We thoroughly enjoyed the eclipse, under clear sky, and have many memories to share with those 20 eclipse chasers.

Eclipses bring together professional astronomers and amateur chasers like me. There’s a lot of cooperation and citizen science. This summer the Citizen CATE experiment will collect video recordings of the eclipse from citizens across the United States, so scientists can watch about two hours of inner corona dynamics.

The author watching the partial phase of the 2016 eclipse through binoculars with removable solar filters. Photo courtesy of Bill Kramer.

Sometimes we meet at conferences to discuss logistics and science. A grad student might say, “I’m doing work on the F-Corona, specifically in the transition zone, so if you could take photographs of this exposure I’d really appreciate it.” An amateur can send in pictures and get a mention in some scientific paper. It’s fun. And that’s how science gets done.

Because I love math, one of the things that always enthralled me about eclipses is how they are calculated. How do astronomers confirm the timing so precisely, down to the second? I started reading books on how to do it, and then wrote computer programs on how to do it.

For the August eclipse, we’ll just be with friends and family. We’ve found a location just north of Nashville because two years ago my wife and I drove the eclipse path all the way from Wyoming back through Kentucky to check out different location options. Of course, if the weather doesn’t look very good at that location the night before—I’ll use satellite data to check—we’ll get on the road to a better spot. At least I will! I can’t guarantee that my daughter and grandson are going to want to do that. They may say “Nah, it’s not worth it.” I’ll be saying, “Yeah, it is.”

I’m looking forward to this one because we’re bringing a lot of people who have never seen an eclipse before. It’s always fun to get their reaction immediately after totality. So what did you think? “It’s nothing like you described.” Well, yeah, but how can you describe it? There’s almost a religious epiphany that occurs. It’s the eye of God looking down on you. There’s nothing that really puts words to it. They just say, “I had no idea.” And then “When’s the next one?”

I love that. “When’s the next one? Where is it?”

The post Confessions of an Eclipse Chaser appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Brower, once head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth, is a towering figure in the late 20th century environmental movement—and in my own life. One crucial moment in our relationship came at my parents’ annual holiday party in December 1964. I was 22 and about to graduate from Berkeley and join the Peace Corps for a stint in a Turkish village. We knew the Browers because my mother, Beth, had been friends with David’s wife since the 1930s. I have no recollection of what we were talking about, but Dave interrupted to say, “You have a nice speaking voice. Would you be willing to narrate a film for the Sierra Club?” I gulped and said, “Sure.”

Brower was the first executive director the Sierra Club ever hired, beginning in 1952. He led successful campaigns to block two dams proposed inside Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, helped spark the creation of Point Reyes and Cape Cod National Seashores and Kings Canyon National Park, and launched the Sierra Club into a successful book-publishing program with oversized word-and-photograph volumes celebrating special places the club was working to save. He increased the membership of the Sierra Club nearly ten-fold and was a familiar figure on Capitol Hill, a skilled lobbyist and publicist for nature.

By the time of that holiday party, Dave was approaching the midpoint of his career and was embroiled in a new fight to the death over two proposed hydroelectric dams in the Grand Canyon, a venture spearheaded by President Lyndon Johnson’s administration.

Brower was giving no ground on these dams, especially after he and his conservation allies had acquiesced to the government’s plan to dam Glen Canyon, just upstream from the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. The move had been a tradeoff to save Dinosaur National Monument, and it was a decision Brower would regret for the rest of his life. Glen was nearly 200 miles long with only the gentlest of rapids, dozens of side canyons of soaring Navajo sandstone, more beautiful than the Dinosaur canyons it was sacrificed to save. The film he asked me to narrate celebrated Glen Canyon, and mourned its loss.

After narrating the film I did my stretch in the Peace Corps, ending in the summer of 1967 with a $5-a-day tour around Europe. From London, I wrote Brower a letter offering my services to the Sierra Club, but claiming no relevant education or experience. Just enthusiasm.

Brower seldom answered his mail. He was, however, known for his long memory, and kept nearly everything on paper for future reference. One of his tenets was that a phone call is nearly always better than a letter, because letters take too long to reach their destinations and get put into piles to be acted on later.

Upon my return from the Peace Corps, I got a job at Head Start. I met a talented young photographer who, when he learned I knew Brower, asked if I’d see if Brower would be willing to look at his work. I phoned, and Dave asked me to drop by his house up the hill in Berkeley later that evening.

The house had been built in 1947 after Brower returned from the war in Italy. River-polished rocks covered most of the horizontal surfaces, and photos and maps adorned the walls. A macaque monkey named Isabelle, rescued from the psychology department at UC Berkeley, roamed the house along with two or three black lab mixes.

Around the dinner table that evening, with plenty of scotch under our belts, Brower asked me to craft a book manuscript from journals and magazine articles written by Norman Clyde, a legendary octogenarian Sierra mountaineer, who also happened to be visiting the Browers. I gulped again, and said, “Yes.”

I went to work for the Sierra Club in May 1968. This turned out to be Brower’s final year at the club, as he had gotten into trouble with his board of directors for various faults, some real, most political. After a vote by the members of the Sierra Club, Dave resigned the following spring and I was fired along with several other partisans.

Dave immediately put the unpleasantness behind him. The rest of us refugees could complain for hours about the injustice we’d just lived through, but Dave had more important things to spend his energy on. He would bravely say that what had just happened was a mitosis, as when a cell doubles itself by dividing in two.

Midway through 1969, Dave, along with a handful of former Sierra Club staffers and volunteers, started Friends of the Earth. It was meant to complement the Sierra Club and other existing organizations, to do the work the club didn’t want Brower to do in its name. This would include a vigorous international program, expansion into campaigns involving energy policy, the protection of public health, pollution abatement, and other concerns beyond forests, parks, and wildlife.

The organization was small and scrappy, and made noise by defeating federal subsidies for a Boeing-built supersonic transport aircraft, delaying construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline for several years (resulting in a far safer pipeline), and leading the crusade against nuclear power, aiming its fire first at the Diablo Canyon reactors on the central California coast.

The Sierra Club board had agreed not to oppose the Diablo proposal in order to save the Nipomo Dunes nearby. A minority on the board thought this a dreadful decision, given Diablo Canyon’s remoteness and beauty. A fierce internal battle erupted within the club. Brower’s opposition to Diablo, in fact, had been one big reason he was chased out of the Sierra Club, the old guard arguing that the club had given its word; others arguing that the club was duty-bound to oppose despoliation of precious stretches of pristine coastline.

At the time, the Sierra Club’s opposition to Diablo was simply because of where it would be built. Later, Brower and many others came to oppose nuclear power altogether because of the plants’ vulnerability to terrorism and natural disasters.

Things went well for a long spell, but in 1986 Friends of the Earth, with finances in bad shape and a deeply divided board, closed up shop in San Francisco, forcing Brower off the board and laying off the staff, leaving only a small operation in Washington, D.C. He must have been discouraged, but again he refused to dwell on the past.

Instead, Dave and several others went to work building Earth Island Institute, which Dave had started a few years prior in case Friends of the Earth decided to dispense with his services. Earth Island is an umbrella that shelters and nurtures dozens of small organizations working on a wide variety of projects in every corner of the world.

I, for my part, took a job with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and stayed in touch with Brower, who by then was approaching 80 years of age. We’d meet occasionally for lunch or drinks; he was always full of ideas and suggestions for new projects.

As I neared retirement in 2008 I was casting about for a big project and Brower influenced my life again. Dave had written two ramshackle autobiographical memoirs as well as a borderline manifesto titled Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run. However, at the time of his death in November 2000, no one had written a proper biography about him. More distressingly, he was being forgotten. When I talked with young environmental lawyers they only vaguely recalled his name. “I really must do this book,” I thought, “And I hope that it helps keep his story alive.”

The post Sixteen Years After His Death, a Renowned Environmentalist Won His Longest Fight appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

is solution
to architecture

        bone and stone

conform
briefly
then fall away

        [As] the foot
exposed
seldom changes
in appearance,
physical as it is
proper,

water [will] rise
running east and west.

        the earth ruind

60 feet
of earth 50 feet
now 5

        i see your
surface
all
trim all
wall and form

features I found
in inches

        I lie

near perpendicular
and smoke
        The rose face
the inner circle

the neck
flush

        Outside

the south side I stand
upright

the compass point
coincid[ing] with the universe

pass
over these
ancient acres

the tongue

        i am able in early July
to lie down

        twenty-four rows of
        me
        and each one so
broken and weathered
as to require excavation

i found

The buried man
we found

in the presence

of conjectured occupants
trac[ed] upon the
here and now

I scatter ash
in the corner

This seems of some importance

these layers
thes
many dark layers

this drift dark
streak along the earth

i held

        a pot
top to bottom

        a stone axe
to my face

        i held out
without breaking

        back back

        I [learned
to] take meaning hard
into the cave,
judge it–

It lies.
It is thin.

I appear abruptly
then go.

        absence
and nearness to destruction is

[a] most decorative leavetaking

        I found purposes of repair
several miles west
farther west

a spring
and another
Converge
then fall

        The irregular
court rough ruin

The well dressed are
well preserved

and free

        their great concerns longer
and wider [than ours]

        before
I was not able to form an opinion

my cattle Brain selected few
broken and weathered
thoughts To Think

 
Note: This work is an erasure of “A Further Study of Prehistoric Small House Ruins in the San Juan Watershed” by T. Mitchell Prudden.

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