Culture and Nature

The content of the article linked below is, ultimately, distressing. By using harvest records from 664 years of grape-growing in the Bourgogne region of France, these researchers were able to determine that there has been a significant increase in temperature in the region - harvests are now happening 13 days earlier than the average for the previous 664 years. The most significant change has happened since the late 80's.

That is nearly half a month difference, and reflects some noteworthy warming.

And that is distressing. At some point, if unchecked, getting grapes to harvest in the Bourgogne is going to start becoming more and more difficult. 

But on the other hand, this study surprised me by also making me feel quite tender-hearted about the history of wine-growing and growers in this region. 664 years of families growing grapes and making wine is a long time. 664 years of knowing a landscape, working with the sun and seasons, predicting rainfalls. 664 years of integration between the economics, the politics, the culture, and the nature of this region.  The simple fact that grapes can still grow there at all is testament to conscientious farming practices - considering that the history of large-scale farming in the United States goes back only a couple hundred years - and the result has been massive top soil loss, mineral depletion, and post-war, with the full-scale implementation of corporate farming - ultimately the loss of small farms and the cultures that they created.

Too often we humans think of ourselves as separate. Different from the rest of nature in some essential way. Whether it is Biblical "dominion" or Cartesian "Dualism"--from the vantage of our cars or desks, it can be hard to feel anything but alienation from our planet. After all, our busy, frenetic, increasingly internet-and-media-focused lives even leave us alienated from each other and from our own bodies.

I've never been to the Bourgogne, but did visit Toulouse once for a Eco-Criticism conference at the university. After our first day, the whole group went out to eat at a local restaurant, where the chef was frustrated trying to find me (a vegan) something to eat, even commenting that the diet was "not very practical ..." (And by the way, the resulting pyramid of rice with sautéed vegetables was absolutely gorgeous). But the first thing we were served was a local liqueur mixed with a local sparkling wine. A traditional aperitif in Toulouse. It was golden and tasted like sunshine and earth fused on the tongue. It tasted like what I had imagined wine must be like when I was a kid. And there was a centuries long history to its production.  

Whatever concepts or devices may block the way - we are all made of Earth. Quite literally. 

This article (below) had the amazing effect of making me both hate and love human beings at the same time ... 664 years of harvest records for one wine-growing town in France ... and what they mean.

https://climatenewsnetwork.net/french-wines-show-hot-dry-years-are-now-normal/?fbclid=IwAR2bU9DRpZ1ui9liHGPNL5FTsmSfnXghxvw8GNLGn4BkA7_uYmrGt_e5MYo

Forest Fires and Carbon Emissions

It's been over a year since I posted anything on the blog. In a very practical sense, it doesn't really seem to exist anymore ... but I'm beginning to contemplate a resurrection.

To that end, I've been posting short little blurbs and news articles on FB the past week or so in the lead up to the Climate Strike this September and I thought, why not transfer some of these over to the blog as a start.

So here we go:

I've been seeing some interesting reactions around the net to the news of the fires in the Amazon. People saying "But the smoke will block the sun and slow global warming." Sorry - but trees are one of the most important ways for our planet to trap carbon (C02 is the top greenhouse gas we're worried about, followed by Methane). So not only are we losing the forests that act as filters and carbon-traps, but the smoke is full of carbon, therefore increasing the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Add to that that the main reason for the fires is to clear land for cattle grazing, and you also add in an increase in methane production as well. Article below about the importance of our forests.Here is a great article about the importance of our forests.

https://climatenewsnetwork.net/tree-loss-brings-more-warming-as-world-heats/?fbclid=IwAR1ktCxMNiQ_vknOkxill6PJOtN0PJJH5DQ8Xau-T1XCt1XMCdj12kVh5Es

And if you haven't signed on for daily updates from Climate News Network, I highly recommend it. I know that the stress of the endless flow of climate news can feel overwhelming - but they actually include good news stories, too, when they can be had.

x

Sometimes we pick raspberries …

There are some days when you just need to pick raspberries. Make bread. Nurse a baby mouse. Water the garden. The raspberries come ripe and either you will go out into the sunshine, breathe the air, bend over the canes – pick berry by berry – or the fruit slips past sweet, melts, falls. Pears are like this too. And apples. Catch them before they are gone, eaten, moldering into the ground.

And when you find tiny mice in the back seat of the car – furred but eyes not yet open – you can either abandon them, sacrifices on a rock for a predator god – or tuck them in a box, feed them goat’s milk from an eyedropper every two hours until you find a wildlife rehabilitator to take them in. Everything else suspended as the mouse grasps the glass dropper with tiny claws. The energy of each one unique, a singular frequency you can touch, that resonates through the fine bones of the hand as you warm her in your palm. (You will miss this vibration when it is gone).

There are days when you need to take the soaked and soured buckwheat batter, make it into bread. You water the roses, re-pot the aloe, transplant the white-rooted Chlorophytum comosum, make sure the hummingbirds still have sugar water – in case there are any left drifting south before the first frost. You must feed the bees.

The is ecology. Home-lessons of the borderlands. Pick fruit when ripe. Tend the garden. Feed the babies. Culture the bread. There is something larger than yourself. A world you fit into.

New Blog: What is a fulcrum and a bear?

A bit of a strange name for a blog I suppose – when I first thought of the idea for a blog and was tossing around names, I kept coming back to a poem I wrote a few years ago – published in this year’s Santa Fe Literary Review (out now). The more I kept thinking about the poem, the more I thought that it holds within it the seeds of a philosophy - a way of looking at the world - that is what I would want for my blog.

To me the poem is about an urge toward change – not just political or economic change - but a shift of perception that touches on everything. In the world of my poem the fulcrum of this change is not from the world of technology, not made from the usual materials of our current age  – it is something from the earth itself: a chthonic energy.

Chthonic comes from the Greek, khthon, one of the Greek words for earth -  particularly in or under the earth. In psychology it is used as a term for the spirit of nature within the psyche. My own definition is a bit more complicated – the poem probably does a better job of heading toward defining it than I can here. And it is part of what I want to explore in this blog. So here’s the poem to launch the blog … where the main theme … in a really eclectic way…will be about the question of who are we as human beings on planet earth.

The fulcrum and the bear

There is a fulcrum. It is not made of dirt or iron. It is thin as rain, the whisper of a snowflake riding down the divide. 

It is not a fist. 

I will tell you this: it is not patient, not going to spend eternity stitching shoes together or clipping coupons from the Sunday Times. 

Where is the lever?

It is not as simple as that. But I have been dreaming lately of old women abandoned in the back rooms of houses, left in closets to die of thirst. These grandmothers have a thread of red cotton tied to their ring finger. They die alone but the small rectangular bundles of bones continue to tell stories.

I’ve never met a bear but I think there is one near the house. I hold the lamp out into the dark and see the shadows of trees collide with trees. He must be in hibernation now, midwinter, but his soul’s out wandering. He circles, blows a little warm air onto the ruff of the neighbor’s hound, who bays as if his skin were being split down the middle. 

If the bear wandered, lonely, up the stairs to my bedroom, I would give myself to him.