Monday, September 30, 2013
In amongst my rereading of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin series of British naval adventures during the Napoleonic Wars, I have been exploring a writer new to me: Henry David Thoreau. I avoided Thoreau for years after imbibing the attitudes of an influential high school English teacher, but about a year ago decided to give him a look. The peculiar ne'er-do-well's most-read work is Walden, written in the years following his two-year experiment in living simply and alone on the shore of his local pond. Of course, that was only a small part of his life and activity. He was very hard to pigeon-hole, and quite a character.
Not far into Walden I fell hook line and sinker, and now cannot get enough of him, and his life and times. After reading Walden, his Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and Cape Cod, I have been slowly making my way through some of his true life's work: his journals. At the same time, I'm reading a new biography called The Thoreau You Don't Know. I recently visited Concord, and his grave in the cemetery there.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Since spring I have been reading my usual eclectic mix. I re-read John McPhee's Annals of the Former World, brushing up once more on the geology of the US and some of the characters who know it.
In afterwards wandering the public library in search of books on the Inuit, Aleut and Eskimo peoples I stumbled upon McPhee's Coming Into the Country, and soon wondered how this gem had escaped my attention. What an adventure! And what a different world! I would now jump at the chance to visit Alaska--the real Alaska outside the cities.
On the same library visit I happened upon Ernst Mayer's Growth of Biological Thought--an adventure of another sort, but no less stimulating. I have long wanted an answer to an historical question: why was biblical creationism still a respectable theory far into the 19th century, long after the physical sciences had discarded the idea of divine intervention to explain phenomena? In a nutshell, the inexplicable diversity and uncanny adaptedness of organisms seemed to require it--in contrast to the simpler and more straightforward phenomena of the physical sciences. Biology was God's last refuge...
In Chatham, on a sailing trip with Trevor, I picked up a copy of Wolfe's Hard Way Around, his biography of Joshua Slocum. It really fleshes-out the story of the world's first solo circumnavigator. I will never again read Slocum's cheerful Around the World Alone without the knowledge of his adventurous early life, and the melancholy awareness of his beloved first wife's spirit, and Slocum's sad and undeserved decline into obscurity before his eventual disappearance.
I am just now finishing My Old Man and the Sea, the adventure of a father and son who outfitted and sailed a small boat around Cape Horn about thirty years ago--an outward adventure as well as the adventure of a strong relationship. A very good read!
Saturday, May 19, 2012
It has been so long since I've looked at this that I'm not sure I can remember all I've read since. But here goes.
I did read Aldo Leopold's Southwest, although not all the way to the end. After awhile you get the gist. The message is: he didn't get where he did all at once, but gradually over many years, and made his share of regretable mistakes. I was a bit shocked to learn that he was at the center of the early 20th century attitudes toward "game management". It really was game--not wildlife, and the management included wiping out competing predators such as wolves. (Thus the significance of the documentary title Green Fire, from a Leopold quote about watching that fire go out in a wolf he'd shot.) He gradually came to see game animals and predators both as parts of larger ecosystems. I followed this with Leopold's Sand County Almanac (including Round River).
Once I had gotten over the idea that Leopold had, in his earlier career, himself advocated destruction of predator populations in an effort to build bigger game herds (from the writings collected in Aldo Leopold in the Southwest), the thing that sticks with me is his insistence that real outdoorsmen are either hunters or fisherman, or (just possibly) ornithologists. It almost makes me want to take another look at hunting, so I can understand him. Having said that, Leopold would have had little good to say about the contemporary hunter's technology--he was harsh with practices that would seem spartan to us today. Mild surprise is his confusion of ecosystem matter and energy flows. (Although his broader naiveté about ecosystem stability over time and geological history is not to be strongly criticized at so early a date.) His outlook on preservation of wild places seems to me a bit pessimistic. His ideas about a land ethic stick close to a humanistic approach that simply broadens the understanding of what is good for us: we benefit from ecosystem stability and productivity, rather than "it is intrinsically wrong to destroy a whole species."
His writing about his wilderness ethic still inspires me, but also leaves me a little conflicted: he was a lifelong and enthusiastic hunter, and could sit outside in the evaporating fogs of early morning, coffee in hand, listening companionably and with intimate understanding to the sounds of birds and other animals going about their business--and then eagerly hunt them with a shotgun later that day. He had high praise for hunters, who were the original conservationists. It almost makes me want to take up hunting so I can understand this properly. --but not quite. I was also a little amazed to find a rather fuzzy grasp in his writing of as basic a distinction as that between energy flow and element cycling.
I finally bought Green Fire for myself from the Leopold Foundation, and plan to watch it soon. If I am ever within a couple hundred miles of his Sand County shack, I will definitely make a pilgrimage.
After Leopold, I reread The Ancestors' Tale by Richard Dawkins, which follows human evolution in reverse--discussing each branching in the tree of life that includes human ancestors as if it were a rendezvous--an interesting way of getting around the problem of implying inevitability and purposefulness that comes from studying human evolution in a forward direction. Many of his essays in this book are worthwhile reading--none so much as those that explicate the gene's eye view, with the family tree of an individual gene being every bit as important as that of an individual, and the patterns of evolution, which seem so difficult to argue with after having grown up with the contingency and unrepeatability ideas of Stephen J. Gould.
I am now well into John McPhee's Annals of a Former World. I began rereading because I though it worthwhile; I continue to read because I'm captivated. I am developing a new appreciation for the "Old Geology," the events that led to the plate techtonics revolution, and geologists who know their rock intimately. I plan to visit some of the places he writes of via Google Earth--which didn't exist when I read the book the first time!
Thursday, October 27, 2011
I read constantly. Nowadays mostly non-fiction, and the fiction is mostly old favorites. I am writing this mainly to help myself remember the sort of stream-of-consciousness way I have planned my reading lately. Right now I am re-reading Moby Dick by Herman Melville, and Consilience by Eward O. Wilson. When I finish Consilience, I am planning on reading Aldo Leopold's Southwest and then re-reading his Sand County Almanac. I may afterward dive into From So Simple A Beginning, by my old friend Charles Darwin, but it's hard to see so far ahead. Who knows what other books may suddenly pop up to distract me?
Moby Dick is a book I have turned to occasionally when "going to sea"; the first time I re-read it as an a adult was as a romantic conceit when I was going sailing for several days. Now it strikes me as the right book for the occasion. After taking it aboard for a two-day-and-night trip a few weeks ago, I am making by leisurely way amongst Stubb, Flask, Queequeg, Ahab and of course my host, "Ishmael." On this my approximately 3rd re-reading, I still find suprises and insights fairly frequently.
Consilience: The unity of knowledge I came upon when winnowing my library for a few more books I was willing to part with to begin a book exchange at church. I acquired it years ago, beginning but never finishing it; now I find Wilson's ideas more compelling and am willing to slog through some pretty dense understory to reach these towering trees. Edward O. Wilson is a significant figure, and I have read several others of his books already. In Consilience, Wilson tries to use science to show how nearly all the disciplines can be connected together with science as the glue and chief interpreter. He is compelling if not entirely convincing. And he certainly has chutzpah!
While surfing the web (something I seldom feel up to, atheletically speaking) a week or so ago I came across notice of a recently-released documentary about the life of Aldo Leopold called "Green Fire." If I had any money right now I'd get the dvd, but for now I'll content myself with finishing Aldo Leopold's Southwest, which is a series of writings that shows the origin of some of his later thought, and then re-reading A Sand County Almanac, in which his ideas are fully-forned.
On my list, though not so high, is my new From So Simple A Beginning, which is a beautiful hard-cover collection of the most seminal of Charles Darwin's books. In retrospect, I should have grabbed cheap paperback versions of these books: its very weightiness may slow me down: the thing is so thick and heavy I have to read it sitting at a table; it is in no way portable. But Darwin cannot be avoided even if in ponderous form: he not only got the ball rolling but was amazingly precient: I recently discovered that the intriguing idea that human "racial" differences might have resulted from sexual selection acting in concert with culture--matters of local fashion--originated with him!
In amongst my rereading of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin series of British naval adventures during the Napoleonic Wars, I have been exploring a writer new to me: Henry David Thoreau. I avoided Thoreau for years after imbibing the attitudes of an influential high school English teacher, but about a year ago decided to give him a look. The peculiar ne'er-do-well's most-read work is Walden, written in the years following his two-year experiment in living simply and alone on the shore of his local pond. Of course, that was only a small part of his life and activity. He was very hard to pigeon-hole, and quite a character.
Not far into Walden I fell hook line and sinker, and now cannot get enough of him, and his life and times. After reading Walden, his Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and Cape Cod, I have been slowly making my way through some of his true life's work: his journals. At the same time, I'm reading a new biography called The Thoreau You Don't Know. I recently visited Concord, and his grave in the cemetery there.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Since spring I have been reading my usual eclectic mix. I re-read John McPhee's Annals of the Former World, brushing up once more on the geology of the US and some of the characters who know it.
In afterwards wandering the public library in search of books on the Inuit, Aleut and Eskimo peoples I stumbled upon McPhee's Coming Into the Country, and soon wondered how this gem had escaped my attention. What an adventure! And what a different world! I would now jump at the chance to visit Alaska--the real Alaska outside the cities.
On the same library visit I happened upon Ernst Mayer's Growth of Biological Thought--an adventure of another sort, but no less stimulating. I have long wanted an answer to an historical question: why was biblical creationism still a respectable theory far into the 19th century, long after the physical sciences had discarded the idea of divine intervention to explain phenomena? In a nutshell, the inexplicable diversity and uncanny adaptedness of organisms seemed to require it--in contrast to the simpler and more straightforward phenomena of the physical sciences. Biology was God's last refuge...
In Chatham, on a sailing trip with Trevor, I picked up a copy of Wolfe's Hard Way Around, his biography of Joshua Slocum. It really fleshes-out the story of the world's first solo circumnavigator. I will never again read Slocum's cheerful Around the World Alone without the knowledge of his adventurous early life, and the melancholy awareness of his beloved first wife's spirit, and Slocum's sad and undeserved decline into obscurity before his eventual disappearance.
I am just now finishing My Old Man and the Sea, the adventure of a father and son who outfitted and sailed a small boat around Cape Horn about thirty years ago--an outward adventure as well as the adventure of a strong relationship. A very good read!
Saturday, May 19, 2012
It has been so long since I've looked at this that I'm not sure I can remember all I've read since. But here goes.
I did read Aldo Leopold's Southwest, although not all the way to the end. After awhile you get the gist. The message is: he didn't get where he did all at once, but gradually over many years, and made his share of regretable mistakes. I was a bit shocked to learn that he was at the center of the early 20th century attitudes toward "game management". It really was game--not wildlife, and the management included wiping out competing predators such as wolves. (Thus the significance of the documentary title Green Fire, from a Leopold quote about watching that fire go out in a wolf he'd shot.) He gradually came to see game animals and predators both as parts of larger ecosystems. I followed this with Leopold's Sand County Almanac (including Round River).
Once I had gotten over the idea that Leopold had, in his earlier career, himself advocated destruction of predator populations in an effort to build bigger game herds (from the writings collected in Aldo Leopold in the Southwest), the thing that sticks with me is his insistence that real outdoorsmen are either hunters or fisherman, or (just possibly) ornithologists. It almost makes me want to take another look at hunting, so I can understand him. Having said that, Leopold would have had little good to say about the contemporary hunter's technology--he was harsh with practices that would seem spartan to us today. Mild surprise is his confusion of ecosystem matter and energy flows. (Although his broader naiveté about ecosystem stability over time and geological history is not to be strongly criticized at so early a date.) His outlook on preservation of wild places seems to me a bit pessimistic. His ideas about a land ethic stick close to a humanistic approach that simply broadens the understanding of what is good for us: we benefit from ecosystem stability and productivity, rather than "it is intrinsically wrong to destroy a whole species."
His writing about his wilderness ethic still inspires me, but also leaves me a little conflicted: he was a lifelong and enthusiastic hunter, and could sit outside in the evaporating fogs of early morning, coffee in hand, listening companionably and with intimate understanding to the sounds of birds and other animals going about their business--and then eagerly hunt them with a shotgun later that day. He had high praise for hunters, who were the original conservationists. It almost makes me want to take up hunting so I can understand this properly. --but not quite. I was also a little amazed to find a rather fuzzy grasp in his writing of as basic a distinction as that between energy flow and element cycling.
I finally bought Green Fire for myself from the Leopold Foundation, and plan to watch it soon. If I am ever within a couple hundred miles of his Sand County shack, I will definitely make a pilgrimage.
After Leopold, I reread The Ancestors' Tale by Richard Dawkins, which follows human evolution in reverse--discussing each branching in the tree of life that includes human ancestors as if it were a rendezvous--an interesting way of getting around the problem of implying inevitability and purposefulness that comes from studying human evolution in a forward direction. Many of his essays in this book are worthwhile reading--none so much as those that explicate the gene's eye view, with the family tree of an individual gene being every bit as important as that of an individual, and the patterns of evolution, which seem so difficult to argue with after having grown up with the contingency and unrepeatability ideas of Stephen J. Gould.
I am now well into John McPhee's Annals of a Former World. I began rereading because I though it worthwhile; I continue to read because I'm captivated. I am developing a new appreciation for the "Old Geology," the events that led to the plate techtonics revolution, and geologists who know their rock intimately. I plan to visit some of the places he writes of via Google Earth--which didn't exist when I read the book the first time!
Thursday, October 27, 2011
I read constantly. Nowadays mostly non-fiction, and the fiction is mostly old favorites. I am writing this mainly to help myself remember the sort of stream-of-consciousness way I have planned my reading lately. Right now I am re-reading Moby Dick by Herman Melville, and Consilience by Eward O. Wilson. When I finish Consilience, I am planning on reading Aldo Leopold's Southwest and then re-reading his Sand County Almanac. I may afterward dive into From So Simple A Beginning, by my old friend Charles Darwin, but it's hard to see so far ahead. Who knows what other books may suddenly pop up to distract me?
Moby Dick is a book I have turned to occasionally when "going to sea"; the first time I re-read it as an a adult was as a romantic conceit when I was going sailing for several days. Now it strikes me as the right book for the occasion. After taking it aboard for a two-day-and-night trip a few weeks ago, I am making by leisurely way amongst Stubb, Flask, Queequeg, Ahab and of course my host, "Ishmael." On this my approximately 3rd re-reading, I still find suprises and insights fairly frequently.
Consilience: The unity of knowledge I came upon when winnowing my library for a few more books I was willing to part with to begin a book exchange at church. I acquired it years ago, beginning but never finishing it; now I find Wilson's ideas more compelling and am willing to slog through some pretty dense understory to reach these towering trees. Edward O. Wilson is a significant figure, and I have read several others of his books already. In Consilience, Wilson tries to use science to show how nearly all the disciplines can be connected together with science as the glue and chief interpreter. He is compelling if not entirely convincing. And he certainly has chutzpah!
While surfing the web (something I seldom feel up to, atheletically speaking) a week or so ago I came across notice of a recently-released documentary about the life of Aldo Leopold called "Green Fire." If I had any money right now I'd get the dvd, but for now I'll content myself with finishing Aldo Leopold's Southwest, which is a series of writings that shows the origin of some of his later thought, and then re-reading A Sand County Almanac, in which his ideas are fully-forned.
On my list, though not so high, is my new From So Simple A Beginning, which is a beautiful hard-cover collection of the most seminal of Charles Darwin's books. In retrospect, I should have grabbed cheap paperback versions of these books: its very weightiness may slow me down: the thing is so thick and heavy I have to read it sitting at a table; it is in no way portable. But Darwin cannot be avoided even if in ponderous form: he not only got the ball rolling but was amazingly precient: I recently discovered that the intriguing idea that human "racial" differences might have resulted from sexual selection acting in concert with culture--matters of local fashion--originated with him!
