Out Among the Stars

       We were back, remote country now, the night skies vividly reminding us what night used to look like before we moved into a city.  Our friend's outdoor fire crackled and sparked, our feet toasty, our bodies cold.  City slickers feeling for a night or two what fewer and fewer call a profession...herder, rancher, farmer.  Up at dawn, which is really night to most of us; a quick cup of java then it's onto the land,  territory we would consider unknown and perhaps scary, a land filled with critters whose eyesight and smell are part of this and whose sounds frighten us.  This is their territory, both predator and prey alike.  This new kid in town best be hightailing it out of here, they think.  They hope.  But with dawn will come another bulldozer, or trench digger, or stave markers.  We are many and they are few.

     Wrote a piece in National Geographic: In southeastern England, an organization called WildEast is creating cracks in the human-dominated landscape, encouraging landowners to let nature run wild again on 20 percent of whatever gardens, farms, or vacant lots they control—they’re at 20,000 acres so far.  In the southeastern Netherlands, as this story from our Dutch edition explains, the countryside is crisscrossed by ancient sunken lanes that had long been neglected, even used to dump old cars or appliances—but turn out to be refuges for badgers, bats, and beetles, and various rare plants.  And in the United States too, as Emma Marris writes in this month’s cover story, the idea is catching on that “we need to do conservation everywhere.”  That means not just in national parks, but in abandoned strip mines in Virginia and in downtown Yonkers, New York.  “We all need to take personal responsibility for whatever space we’ve got,” one of the founders of Britain’s WildEast, Hugh Somerleyton, told Nat Geo’s Tristan McConnell.  “Ordinary people doing ordinary things, that’s where the power lies.”  The goal, as noted in the home page of WildEast: ...to return 250,000 hectares of land to nature and radically change how it is seen.  We must slow, stop and reverse the alarming ecological declines that are happening on our watch.  This is a mission statement that urgently needs your support (and that bit at the end of your garden).

      We had been coming to our friend's cabin for nearly a decade, a cabin he built from scratch, as they say, a personal project that continues but is now more and more comfortable for both him and his guests.  In winter the snow will tower over your head and supplies can only be brought in by sled.  In other times, you need to watch for cactus low on the ground and small, but with spikes that will poke and stick (most cacti needles have minuscule hooks on the end which is why they remain on you)...and hurt.  Over the years our friend has made safe "paths" so you can wander about somewhat freely; just rock markers, really.  At night, if you step out alone say to relieve yourself or to stare at the sky, you can hear the coyotes which sound closer than they probably are, but even they have diminished as more and more people move down here, their homes hidden behind hills and rock piles but exposed as a bright scar from the primitive road scraped through the red rock.  The safety of the cabin becomes even more appealing at those moments.  Most people would consider this hostile country, the red dirt barely covering the hard rock underneath it...but that's the draw for oil and gas companies whose pipes and test wells now dot and will likley cover the landscape before long (when our friend refused their offer to allow them access over his 10 acres, they simply said that they would drill diagonally underneath his property and bypass it; a short walk from his cabin reveals a spiderweb of exposed pipes, warm to the touch and apparently still running full).  

     Beneath us sat a world apparently rich in oil, and gas, and geothermal heat (indeed, an operating geothermal plant sits less than a hundred miles away), a world invisible to most of us but is there nonetheless.  From lava tubes to seas of petrified salt, a world of minerals and fossils remain buried in a sense, a "world" of wonder still teasing our imagination.  Teaching Fellow Bridget Storrie gave us a glimpse of one such hidden world under our feet; as she wrote in The Conversation: The mineworkers -- all men-- have told me I cannot properly understand their world unless I experience it.  I watch the wet walls of the mineshaft slip past as we descend, notice the drips of water on my helmet and a deep bass hum coming from somewhere I cannot place.  I am travelling back in geological time, past rocks that are increasingly ancient as we descend.  For we don’t just possess tiny pieces of Kosovo, Siberia or Alaska in the smartphones in our pockets, but elements of the deep past too – minute reminders that the world we create with them should be enduring.  I feel disoriented at the bottom of the mine, but the workers are intimate with this place.  They tell me they feel good down here.  I watch as they stride off along the tunnel, their boots splashing in the water.  For them, the rock around us is like a human body with veins of minerals and the capacity to expand and contract as if it is breathing.  They listen to the noises it makes and understand what it says to them.  After so many years, they know the sound of danger.

    But we are looking not only at what's under our land (and out in space), but deep into the ocean where nations have already claimed vast parcels in anticipation of a new gold rush, only this one searching not for more fossil fuels but for minerals to provide a new form of power.  Take cobalt, just one of the minerals being sought after to "mine."  Wrote a piece in Hakai: The metal was being used in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and other “green” technologies, as well as in cellphones and laptops.  Demand surged.  In 2016, a tonne of cobalt cost nearly $22,000; by 2018, the price reached $94,500.  Corporations lobbied for access to international seabeds at the International Seabed Authority (ISA), a body in Kingston, Jamaica, tasked by the law of the sea to manage the minerals of oceans no country owns.  They also pursued small governments with jurisdiction over big oceans in places such as the Cook Islands and Nauru, a tiny Pacific nation that sold phosphate to strip-miners until 80 percent of its land became infertile and uninhabitable.  

 

     But there exists yet another hidden world, that of the one deep inside us.  Robert MacFarlane reviewed three books** on navigating this world that is buried deep inside our bodies, a review which appeared in The New York Review of Books: It is now thought that the human hippocampus—which also contains place cells—not only responds in real time to external cues, such as landmarks or thresholds, but also creates and stores cognitive maps of places and routes between them, thereby enabling navigation as well as orientation.  Memory is deeply and mysteriously involved in this work; these cognitive maps are able to retain feelings of recognition and association, and are retrievable even when one is not in the place where they were originally made.  This is what prevents us from having to renavigate familiar places, guessing our way from kitchen to lounge each time we make that brief journey in our own homes.  But he notes that the three authors write that we've lost our way in a sense: ... it was the first decade of the 2000s, when GPS-enabled phones and vehicles became common, that we began seriously to degrade our abilities as wayfinders.  In Nature Shock: Getting Lost in America, Jon T. Coleman locates that degradation much earlier, between 1860 and 1887, when he claims “the ground shifted under Americans’ spatial cognition.”  During these decades, a vast logistical and communication matrix—including the 15,000 miles of telegraph line built by the US Military Telegraph Corps during the Civil War—knitted the country together from coast to coast, creating a network of fixed points nationwide, with reference to which a growing number of individuals could be located.  From then on, Coleman writes, North Americans no longer inhabited “relational space, where people navigated by their relationships to one another,” but rather “individual space, where people understood their position on earth by the coordinates provided by mass media, transportation grids, and commercial networks.”  He suggests that “the best vantage point to see this transition and thereby to understand its consequences is on the edge of those spaces where people sometimes got terribly lost.”  The main point of his review?  Humans don’t possess inbuilt bio-compasses, but we do have something arguably more powerful: storytelling.  Our remarkable navigational ability as a species is closely connected to our ability to tell stories about ourselves that unfold both backward and forward in time. 

     Stephen King took advantage of the pandemic to reflect on this, digging into his childhood memories and putting his spin on a new sort of fairy tale (which became the title of his recent book).  In the book he created his own version of a world hidden deep below ours, where skies were as blue as they were impossible.  Much was the tale of John Moon, a true story of a man beaten down since a child and brought vividly back to life by author Kevin Hazzard: Five minutes ago, the word would've meant nothing, but now...In john's mind it summed up their ability and focus, the hardened look of confidence in their eyes.  The fact that a doctor had followed them, taken orders from them.  The word was a mystery, an answer to a question he didn't know how to ask.  Somewhere out there, beyond the doors of the hospital, something important was happening, something that couldn't be ignored.  Through his quiet years and then the angry ones when he was unreachable and out of control, the extravagant ones, too, when he walked down the street in the loudest clothes he could find --all eyes on me-- that whole time what John wanted was a place in this world where he felt he counted.  For years his life was something that happened to him, as if he was there but not essential.  Helplessness.  Frustration.  Anger.  It all stemmed from a nagging sense of insignificance, but here, packed inside this word --paramedic-- was a way to be seen.  To matter.  Hazzard's captivating writing in his book, American Sirens, reminds us that such a word --paramedic-- didn't exist until the 1970s, and was a system which was started by a group of black medical personnel who braved the odds and showed that such quick responses to medical emergencies could work and save lives, even in their "tough" neighborhoods; it was a world that would still take the non-black world in the US some five years to accept...and to take credit for, and to implement, and to push out the people who created it.  A fairy tale.

  

      We have critters outside our house, the usual feral cats, a few families of raccoons, even a coyote, all of whom can be captured on the outside trail camera while we sleep; and we're in a pretty normal neighborhood, maybe not totally urban but definitely sub-urban and nowhere near rural.  Homes are clustered close together, small yards, paved streets crisscrossed, a large grocery store 3 blocks up.  We walk the dog in the evening, we chat with the neighbors, we lock the doors.  But this is still their world.  We humans dig and bury; we build and walk away (as exemplified by the abandoned Italian towns shown in National Geographic), we conquer as victors and before long become the victims (note Hadrian's Wall), we survive the floods and the droughts while forgetting the many who weren't so lucky.  From Atlantis to King Arthur, from the Pyramids to the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, we want to believe that the civilizations before us were real and existed as fully as ours...only they're gone, our memories and images of them as crumbled as the rocks that once stood as tall as palaces.  And who's to say we won't become some other civilization's "memory," a world now extinct and perhaps sucked into invisibility a distant 3.5 million gigabytes away, we humans now little more than aurochs to the other world.

     Stephen King in his own fairy tale, wrote that besides thanking his family, editors and illustrators, he wanted to thank others: ...I  want to thank you, Constant Reader, for investing your time and imagination in my tale.  I hope you enjoyed your visit to that other world.  One other thing: I have a Google Alert on my name, and over the last year I've seen many obituaries of those lost to COVID who have enjoyed my book.  Too many.  I mourn the passing of each one and send condolences to the surviving friends and family members.  Sitting out among the stars, and yet having the safety of a nearby cabin, you can allow your mind to relax and to imagine.  Objects that you rarely see appear in the night sky, noises that you rarely hear come from distant hilltops, cloud formations changing from bright white to crimson before disappearing altogether as you sleep.  For me, it was all a fairy tale, a time to think of what else may be "out there" or underneath my feet, or even just beyond the rocks and thorns and lights of the cabins.  Life has been a grand carousel ride which I've been fortunate enough to still be on, still alive at this point and luckily still surrounded with family, friends, and animals.  And within all those moments of gaiety and thankfulness, I always reflect on the many who are struggling, not only financially but with health or depression or a twist of fate which has left them with a life of uphill challenges, the life of John Moon.  To me, acknowledging his readers was the real joy of King's book, both those who are still around and those who have passed.  And now it is my turn...to those few who have read or perhaps continue to read these writings and reflections, I send out a huge thank you.  It is my hope, as it's been all the while, to provide some sort of impetus to jumpstart a few of your own thoughts and perhaps send those thoughts off in a new direction, a new avenue you've yet to explore, perhaps even if that journey is in finding and questioning yourself, a world maybe buried and yet to be uncovered.  Agree or disagree, to keep reading or to stop, it doesn't matter...I thank all of you and wish all of you good health.  And remember that everyone, but especially you, has a story to tell. Wrote composer Osvaldo Golijovo: ...the circles, the worlds, are not static.  They are in constant motion, so that the shared areas, the areas of intersections, collisions and eclipses, are continually changing.  Creators, musicians and others evolve all the time.  You can never bathe twice in the same river, Heraclitus said, not only because the waters have changed, but because you have changed as well...

*The Hakai piece explained deep sea mining this way: Mining is not just a problem of extraction and the environmental degradation associated with it.  It is also a problem of world-making.  What sort of worlds do we want our geological resources to create for us?  Who are they for?  How long will they last?  And who, and what, might suffer because of them?...Yet metals and minerals promise to make the world different for all of us.  The lithium in our antidepressants.  The stainless steel in the needles of our syringes that deliver vaccines, anaesthetics, Botox.  The aluminium in our heat pumps, the copper in our wind turbines, the titanium in the Mars Exploration Rovers and the gold in the James Webb telescope.  They all bring certain futures into view and allow us to feel confident about them: that we won’t be sad, that we won’t age, that we can achieve net-zero carbon and look after the planet – even that we can find an alternative world to escape to.

**The books reviewed by MacFarlane were Wayfinding, From Here to There, and Nature Shock: Getting Lost in America.  Also do check your library for accessing digital libraries to magazines such as National Geographic and others...and it's free via Overdrive (Libby. Kanopy, etc.); did I mention that free video streaming of concerts and such is also available from your library?  And if you're willing to shell out a few bucks for a subscription service, WIRED offers these recommendations for  services that will stream everything from comics to audio books...the world awaits!