Gabriel Popkin

This post originally appeared on The Sieve.

In 1987, Wendell Berry complained in a delightfully grumpy essay that “a number of people” were advising him to buy a computer. This new machine would, his friends and colleagues surely believed, free the great writer from the drudgery of composing by hand. It could save his drafts, allow him to cut and paste, and maybe even spell-check. So did Berry join his colleagues and leap into the digital age?

Absolutely not. He could write just fine with pencil and paper, he explained. When he finished a draft, his wife Tanya typed—and edited—his manuscript on a Royal standard typewriter (a practice that did not sit well with some feminists). A computer would disrupt the Berrys’ finely tuned “literary cottage industry”—a highly productive industry that has led to over 50 (and counting) books and collections of poems and essays. It’s easy to see why Berry would be wary.

Writing before computers

I think today’s writer has far more to be wary about than Berry did, back when computers were little more than glorified typewriters. Today’s machines are spigots at the end of a pipeline delivering an endless stream of information from the outside world. Each news update and email and tweet has the potential to derail a writer’s train of thought—and yet we let them in. Do we really believe this has no effect on our ability to write?

In fact, scientists are amassing a mountain of evidence that computer-based distractions can devastate mental performance. In a recent New York Times article, journalist Bob Sullivan and scientist Hugh Thompson described a study in which they gave subjects an exam and then told some participants they would be interrupted by an instant message. The subjects who were interrupted performed 20% worse than uninterrupted test-takers. “The results,” the authors wrote, “were truly dismal.”

And it’s not just exam-taking that’s affected—it’s all kinds of mental activity. Last week on the radio program Science Friday, Stanford University psychologist Clifford Nass told host Ira Flatow that constant multitaskers are worse at focusing, thinking creatively, and even multitasking itself. “The research is almost unanimous…that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits,” Nass said. “They’re pretty much mental wrecks.”

More worrisome, these distractions also seem to have the power to make our brains want more of them. A growing body of literature suggests Internet applications harness the same neurological reward pathways that addictive drugs have long exploited. Scientists have recently identified a phenomenon known as “phantom vibration”—the feeling that a cell phone is vibrating in response to an incoming message, even when it isn’t. As someone who compulsively looks for the little parenthetical “(1)” after the word “Inbox” on my web browser, I have to say this kind of research is confirming what I know all too well from experience.

Yet despite the mounting evidence, science writers—and probably many others—face increasing pressure to embrace every new social media platform. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a writers’ conference that didn’t include, in some form, a panel of writers selling their colleagues on the glories of Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and the like. If we don’t expose ourselves to the endless volley of information bomblets, we’re told we’ll miss out on the all-important “conversation.” I sometimes wonder if I’m the only one who finds this a rather poor substitute for what we now must call “in-person” conversation.

I see from Berry’s essay that this pushing of addictive Internet technologies by their users is nothing new. Strangely, it reminds me of the peer pressure teenagers supposedly exert on each other to try cigarettes, booze, or other substances—right down to the “everybody’s doing it” message. Given the known risks, I would suggest we approach addictive technologies with some of the same caution we apply to those drugs. Perhaps we need a new DARE for the Internet age.

The author at work on his computer, ca 1987. Photo by Beate Popkin

That said, I am not about to leave behind the Internet and its attendant technologies. Indeed, for a relatively new (hopefully up-and-coming) writer like me, shunning email, blogs, and social media would be professional suicide. And I appreciate that these technologies allow me to share work, like this essay, with colleagues, editors, and readers around the world. (Even Berry has lately admitted borrowing a friend’s computer to send his work to publishers.) I can’t imagine going back to pencil and paper and snail mail, nor do I wish to. I’d do as well trying to get around by horse.

But I do reject what Berry calls “technological fundamentalism”: the uncritical belief that every new technology will improve our lives. I would argue that a device or service should be judged not by whether it’s novel or whether everybody else is using it, but by whether it actually helps us do our jobs better. While social networking sites may aid writers in publishing and promoting themselves, which are certainly necessary parts of the business, they seem to be detrimental to the writer’s most fundamental task, which, I would argue, is thinking. Deep, uninterrupted thinking.

Despite all scientists have learned about the brain, thinking remains mysterious and idiosyncratic. It seems to resist being forced or hurried. But clearly it can be easily sabotaged. Let’s take a stand against the proliferating technologies that fragment our time and our thoughts. Let’s recognize that our most important tool is not the digital computer or the wireless router but the analog brain.

What do you think—have we let Internet technologies intrude too much in our lives? How do you manage the distraction deluge? Leave a comment—or better yet, tell me in person!

This post originally appeared on The Sieve.

As my devoted readers no doubt realize by now, I’m on a bit of a Rachel Carson kick. I wrote a blog post and produced a radio show about her last fall, and I’m working on an article about her for Johns Hopkins magazine (Carson got her master’s degree at Hopkins). Why this slight Carson obsession? It started with the 50th anniversary of Silent Spring, which got me wondering, as a science writer, how someone armed only with scientific knowledge and words could have such influence. I believe we science writers sometimes sell ourselves short in terms of what we can accomplish, especially in this age of disposable Web writing. Carson can remind us of the potential of writing for impact, not just for mouse clicks.

In 1953, Rachel Carson spoke at a symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting. The topic was the sea frontier. Unlike the other eight panel members with whom she shared a stage, Carson was not a research scientist; she had until recently worked as a staff writer for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. (She was also the only woman on the panel).

At the conference she talked about the book she was writing, The Edge of the Sea, which would be based mainly on her observations, and less on the work of other scientists, as her previous books had been. Carson had scientific training, but it was her writing that earned her the speaking slot: her 1951 book The Sea Around Us had made her the nation’s most famous writer about the oceans and perhaps about all of science.

Although Rachel Carson spent almost her entire career writing about the sea, she is remembered today for her one book about things that happen on land. That book, Silent Spring, awoke the American public to the dangers of many common pesticides, and launched the environmental movement. But while the birth of environmentalism would not have happened exactly when it did and how it did without Carson’s advocacy, it would have happened: Americans would not have tolerated smoggy cities, burning rivers, and toxic chemical clouds for much longer. “I suspect that the audience [of Silent Spring] was close to an environmental awakening,” said Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist and past head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, at a symposium dedicated to Carson at this year’s AAAS meeting. “No doubt [Carson] catalyzed it, but the ground was fertile.”

Carson built her more enduring message around themes of ecological connection and interdependence, Lubchenco and her fellow speakers argued. Jane Maienschein, director of the Center for Biology and Society at Arizona State University and organizer of the 2013 session, noted that this motif permeated Carson’s AAAS talk, as she drew connections between what happens on land and in the oceans, as well as what happens in nature and in the human sphere. Nancy Langston, an environmental historian at the University of Wisconsin (who was not on the AAAS panel), told me that bringing this burgeoning ecological awareness to the public was, in her opinion, “probably [Carson’s] greatest legacy.”

Sharon Kingsland, a historian of science at Johns Hopkins University, took the idea of Carson as connector a step further. In her talk, she made the case that Carson united science and the humanities—the “two cultures” made famous in a 1959 lecture by British scientist and writer C. P. Snow. Specifically, Carson saw in the natural world more than just scientific facts—she saw “clues to a deeper meaning of life” that required pulling in knowledge from the realms of literature and religion as well as science. Moreover, the humanistic perspective provided a check on what Carson saw as the arrogance of scientists who thought they could dismiss the idea of the balance of nature. “This higher truth is revealed to us by contemplating ecological relationships,” Kingsland said. “The concept of the balance of nature functioned for Carson as the link between the two cultures of science and the humanities.”

That these ideas may seem obvious today is a testament to Carson’s enduring influence. But they also suggest a way in which her impact has been limited, because while we may largely accept the premises of ecological interconnectedness and the limitations of science, our actions suggest we don’t accept the conclusions. We continue to fill our environment with carcinogens, neurotoxins, and endocrine disruptors; and we continue to hope for technological solutions to environmental problems, rather than ask how we might restrain the activities that cause the problems in the first place. When I asked Langston’s UW colleague Warren Porter, an environmental toxicologist, what has changed since Carson’s time, he bluntly told me “not much.”

To me this doesn’t diminish Carson in the least. I think she accomplished as much one can with words: she changed the conversation both at the grass-roots level and at the highest ranks of government. But I would like to consider another dimension of her legacy, which is what she has given to my chosen field, science writing. Carson became a full-time science writer in 1934, at a time when no specialized training programs existed in the field, and when the National Association of Science Writers, which formed that same year, consisted of twelve members. Thus, Carson was very much a pioneer in forging a career out of writing about, rather than conducting, scientific research. UW Rachel Carson Professor of English Rob Nixon credits her with “establishing the model of the radical generalist” who “doesn’t necessarily contribute original research, but does read the research and assemble it into powerful images and story forms.” Moreover, Carson set the bar so high that no one has done it better since.

The AAAS 2013 speakers argued that Carson provides a valuable model of a writer who developed a deep subject matter expertise and an ability to write about it both precisely and lyrically. In Lubchenco’s words, she was “an honest broker” of science. Gregg Zachary, a professor of journalism at Arizona State University, said Carson was a member of a rare species: “journalists who seriously endeavor to write about complexity.” Writing has never been an easy vocation, but times are especially tough today; Zachary warned the audience that the financial support Carson had while developing her expertise and writing voice is no longer available to today’s science and environmental journalists. “They don’t have the support to put in the thousands of hours that she put in,” he said. Be that as it may, we at least have Carson as a beacon to strive towards.

Rachel Carson at microscope, 1951, Brooks Studio. Courtesy of the Rachel Carson Council

I want to contribute a related but less tangible answer to the title question. I believe that Carson matters because she gives us a model for seeing. This may seem odd, since we all know Carson for her writing; shouldn’t the skill we hope to learn from her be how to write? Well, yes. But putting words on page is merely the writer’s final act of translation. Most of what Carson did throughout her life, I would argue, was seeing. Even during her scientific training at Johns Hopkins, she spent painstaking weeks sectioning fish embryos, looking at them with a now obsolete optical device called a camera lucida, and drawing them; these drawings make a sizable fraction of her master’s thesis.

Indeed, science is essentially a process of seeing ever farther and deeper; this theme echoes from the ancient Greek philosophers through Copernicus and Galileo to deep-sea explorers to modern physicists who build enormous colliders in order to peer at the tiniest particles imaginable. But writing is also largely a process of seeing. Flannery O’Connor noted that many writers paint, “not because they’re any good at painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things.” Annie Dillard, who indeed paints, is downright obsessed with seeing: she devotes a chapter to it in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and then, for good measure, another in Teaching a Stone to Talk. Several of the most common photos of Carson show her with either binoculars or a microscope, and I don’t think this is accidental. If she achieved more—if her words went farther than those of others—it is mainly because she saw the world more precisely and penetratingly.

This theme resonates for me because I too have lately been trying to learn to see. And in doing so, I’ve realized I’ve been living half-blind. Only in the past year or so can I look at a tree in my neighborhood and have any clue what it is. I’m still all but hopeless with flowers or birds, not to even mention the insects. Even harder to see is what is not there but should be. Warren Porter told me the air used to teem with insects, before we doused our environment with pesticides and let deer and invasive species devastate the native plants that insects eat. I still can’t see the lack of them—the insects or the plants. When I look at the night sky I recognize only a few obvious shapes. And more to the point, I don’t see the missingness of the stars that earlier astronomers saw, stars that are now invisible due to light pollution.

Rachel Carson spent much of her time reading and writing, but she also went to estuaries and marshes and took rides on fishing vessels to study firsthand what was going on with the ocean. From these observations, she developed the motifs of interconnectedness and balance of nature that permeate her work, from her earliest newspaper articles to her magnum opus. If we who are writing about environmental problems today wish to learn from her, we might do well to step away from our computers for a moment, go outside, and practice seeing.

“Nature’s silence is its one remark…” –Annie Dillard [1]

The high plateau known as Dolly Sods, in Appalachian country, is a good place to consider Dillard’s statement—especially in winter.

Where’s the snow?

My friend and I hiked the Sods on a recent January day. We had come to West Virginia to ski, but a few days’ rain had washed away the season’s accumulated snow, leaving only miserable little icy patches clinging to tree roots and shady hollows. So instead we walked through a sodden world of mosses, ferns, and bogs. Water flowed from time to time down the paths, forcing us to either hop from wet rock to wet rock, or skirt the muddy edge. On our first attempt at a trail, we came to a place where water apparently flowing from both directions made a wide, foam-flecked pool, blocking the way forward. We looked for a bypass, but the rhododendron on either side was too thick. So we retreated downhill and chose a different route, which set us toward a creek two and a half miles distant.

Our new route took us through woods, across meadows, over streams, and around trees that had been knocked over like dominoes by Hurricane Sandy, blocking the path at intervals and forcing detours. The landscapes seemed scattered, random: here a grove of young beeches, there a pine plantation, a spruce forest, a blueberry meadow or a limestone outcrop. The brown leaves on the ground were frozen and matted, making a pretty papier mache earth. The ground itself was springy and crunchy, pleasant to walk on. At times we found ourselves stepping on pink and green mosses, soaked through like sponges. A low cold sky hung over us, grey as if reflecting the stones below.

It was a world of water up in the Sods, soaking ground, moss, boots, socks, pant legs. Water flowed every which way, sometimes seemingly both ways at once, turning trails into rivulets, streams, and occasional ponds. It became hard to remember one waterlogged piece of trail from another, or whether the last stream we crossed flowed left to right or right to left. Finally we came to the Red Creek, running fast and brown with tannins. The water tumbled and roared mindlessly, endlessly down a steep gorge, always changing, always the same. We stood on the wet rock next to it, struck by the display of raw, pointless power.

Ice!

Then there was the ice: nature’s answer to the monotony of water. We walked over ice that had frozen on the ground in paper-thin sheets, sometimes forming concentric rings like topo lines on a map. We saw ice that seemed to grow vertically from the ground, like silver hairs fixed with gel. We marveled at combs of icicles formed by waterfall spray that then froze. We saw ice deposited on trees as supercooled water in an ice storm, smoothly sheathing branches. At one point we came across an inexplicable three-inch ice stalagmite. Later on our walk back we saw it again, comforting us that we were on the right path. That tiny unexpected sliver of ice was more distinct, and thus more memorable, than any of the much larger visual clues in our vast landscape.

For me, ice in the temperate zone is precious and should be treated like fine glassware. But my friend enjoyed breaking the thin veneers of ice that formed over depressions in the trail, figuring, I suppose, that nature would do the same in a day or two.

We shared the place with no one and no creature that I saw, save, briefly, one bird. Besides him (or her), we were the only audience in this cold theater. Others were living there; we could tell because we saw what they left behind on the trail. But they didn’t care to put in an appearance that day. Where were they—and what secret scenes were we not witnessing?

And what were we doing there, anyway? Unlike the animals, we had no food to find there, no vital purpose driving us. Indeed, there was precious little up there we could have eaten: moss, maybe? Not much shelter either, nor creature comforts. We ate peanut butter-jelly sandwiches and trail mix on a cold rock and didn’t linger: only movement kept the blood flowing. Were we there to “keep an eye on things,” as Dillard suggests? Why not let the scene play to an empty house? The players don’t care—the beeches would have shivered; the spruces would have whispered; the water would have seeped, trickled, and spilled all the same without us.

I admit I don’t have a better answer, beyond the meeting of eye and sky, ear and torrent, face and chilled air. In short, we went there for sensations and unexpected things.

* * *

It’s awfully lonely, isn’t it, having only ourselves to talk to? The rest of nature seems to speak a language we’ve forgotten: one of scents, chemicals, magnetic cues, photoperiods, and subtle sounds beneath our threshold of hearing. We sense these things too, vestigially, but we’ve become so enthralled with our pretty speech, like babies practicing nonsense words, we practically refuse to listen to anything else. Nature has become a foreign country, we need to relearn the language.

Sometimes I wonder about our frantic activity on this planet. Is it just a palliative for some deeper loneliness, a loneliness we brought upon ourselves by deciding to speak only to each other? Otherwise why do we expend so much effort to constantly gather together, when it rarely brings us food, shelter, or any of the other necessities of life? And why do the world’s religions seem to agree on at least one thing: humans should couple and create more of themselves?

As we’ve ballooned to seven billion and beyond, we’ve had a collective impact on this planet at once superficial and profound. We’ve rearranged most of the land surface, except for those places that are truly inhospitable. We appropriate nearly half the planet’s biological productivity—we, who are only one species out of 10 million or more! And we have taken it upon ourselves to liberate from the ground, in a couple of centuries, quantities of carbon the earth has been storing for millions of years. We may dominate earth’s ecosystems, as a group of prominent ecologists has suggested, and yet, I can imagine the other members of those ecosystems laughing ruefully at our absorbed self-importance. All of humanity has become like that annoying American abroad who can’t understand why the people around him don’t understand English, and thinks maybe if he just talks louder… Meanwhile, our atmospheric carbon blanket thickens, the extinctions pile up, and we careen ever faster toward our strange and unknowable future.

* * *

Once I realized we wouldn’t be skiing, I wanted to write another piece about the death of winter. But Chip Chase, the owner of the Whitegrass cross-country ski “resort,” complicated things for me. He told me that bare ground in winter is not unusual for him—in West Virginia you’re always on the edge of good snow, and even in January you’re prone to warm spells. In fact, Chip said some of the past few years—which have been some of the warmest on record globally—have also been some of his best. This season, for example, Sandy dumped two feet of snow in late October, and the season was off and running.

So much for easy narratives.

[1] Dillard, A. “Teaching a Stone to Talk.” Harper & Row, 1982.

An olive tree from Ithaca, Odysseus’s home

This post originally appeared on The Sieve.

If you’re a writer looking for a good symbol, consider the tree. The author of Genesis did, twice: he placed the tree of life and the tree of knowledge front and center in the Garden of Eden. Homer did, too: When his hero Odysseus returned home after twenty years of war and travel, needing to prove his identity to his skeptical wife, Penelope, he used a tree. “Move our bed into the hallway,” Penelope told her servant, laying a trap. (I’m paraphrasing here.) “It can’t be done,” Odysseus protested. “I carved a post of that bed from a living olive tree.” Only then did Penelope believe the strange man was really her husband, as steady as that post.

Trees have long impressed us with their steadfastness; in fact, some trees from Biblical times are still with us today. But a new story I read recently casts trees in a different role. I first came across a version of this story in a paper published in the journal BioScience in 2007. The authors looked at where trees live using what a tool known as a “climate envelope,” which is a line drawn on a map around the entire range where a given species is able to survive. The scientists compared climate envelopes for 130 trees under 2007 conditions to those predicted for the end of the century, using the same computer models that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change bases its forecasts on. On average, they found that trees’ envelopes moved 700 kilometers north, nearly the distance from Memphis to Chicago.

So does that mean our trees will be moving north as things get warmer? Traveling trees can make great stories: Shakespeare’s Macbeth was vanquished when Birnam Wood moved a few miles to his fortress at Dunsinane Hill. And it would be dramatic indeed if future northern woodsmen and women hunt deer among sprawling live oaks and big-leaf magnolias instead of spruce and pine trees. But the scientists who wrote the BioScience paper noted that actual trees are unlikely to track their climate envelopes’ northward migration in the coming years, at least if unassisted by humans. Trees can “move” up to a few miles in a generation, by setting their seeds aloft in the wind or encasing them in a shell so they can survive a trip in the gut of an animal. But tree generations are long, and most seeds land close to home. Sugar maples, for example, lead a chaste adolescence, and don’t start making seeds until the age of 22 or so. They then send out seeds attached to little helicopters, which spin and float at most the length of a football field before touching down. Scientists estimate trees’ maximum migration rate to be around 50 kilometers per century, with many traveling far slower—a tortoise’s pace in this race.

Read on »