Modern Writers Carry On Thoreau's Legacy

Source: Thoreau's Legacy Wallpapers

This week, I have been taken with a new book - captured in a way that I have not been since I discovered Annie Dillard back in 1976. Thoreau's Legacy: American Stories on Global Warming is a joint effort between the Union of Concerned Scientists and Penguin Books. It is a collection of 64 essays by writers, teachers, scientists, naturalists, grandfathers - ordinary, everyday people who are seeing the effects of global warming. I came acros it in a post at DailyKos - which I normally don't read regularly - and found myself going through the book page by page, captured by the real voices of real people talking about things I'd seen and thought, but never put together before.

As a native of Massachusetts, it's probably not surprising that the essay that first pulled me in was one by Melissa M. Juchniewicz about growing up on Walden Pond. Like Melissa, I fell asleep to the sound of bullfrogs har-rumphing and tree frogs chirping through the night. Like her, I had noticed on trips home that the frogs no longer sing, but hadn't really followed up to find out why. She has and says:

That delicate skin I used to pet allows the frogs to breathe, but it makes them more vulnerable to pollution, pesticides, and ultraviolet rays than any other group of animals. Scientists consider them an early-warning system: their vulnerable skin and fragile eggs mean that they will die from global warming before other groups.

Hers is not the only voice talking about those small changes that are already happening. Thomas Huntington, a scientist living in Augusta, Maine, talks about the changes in the Georgia hills, where a family used to be able to slaughter a hog and store it in the cooler hollows, where it would remain fresh until it was time to cook it. No longer, he says. Since the 1980s, the winters are too warm and meat spoils before it cures.

In Apathy in the Inner City, Sarah Flanders talks about the reality of living in the inner city, in an urban world where the changes are unseen because so many live inside cement blocks.

...people here imagine that the earth will continue forever just as it is; no one has yet built a memorial to everything that has already been lost. If the movement to stop global warming is to succeed, it will have to educate all Americans, not just those who live in beautiful places, about nature and the history of environmental damage.

No one has yet built a memorial to all that has been lost... a poignant statement, especially when you turn a few pages and encounter Mark Hixon's Garden of Ghosts.

But stability can be tenuous, lasting for millennia and then ending abruptly. This kaleidoscopic potpourri of millions of species, born of millions of years of evolution, was no match for the accelerating rate at which modern humans have been warming the global climate with ceaseless carbon emissions. It happened so suddenly. One day all the trees of this grand garden, many of them hundreds of years old, turned as white as snow.

It sounds like science fiction - some cautionary tale from a Harlan Ellison wannabe - but it's not. It's the true story of what happened to the coral forests under the seas just 10 years ago. In 1998, one of the warmest summers on record, 10% of the world's coral reefs turned snow-white because of a disease that's known as "coral bleaching". In 2003, perhaps the warmest year worldwide on record, another wave of coral bleaching deprived us of even more coral forests.

Michael Gold writes about buildings with the heat on through 60 degree November days, because November is supposed to be cold - but it's not so much anymore. New Orleans native Randall Curren mourns The Big Easy and drives home a simple human truth: "our experience of what is normal leads us to discount objective evidence that something out of the ordinary is happening."

Perhaps the most haunting of the essays, however, is Jill Carpenter's essay, Black Spring. With measured, precise prose, she describes the effect of an unnaturally warm 2006 winter in her Seewannee, Tennnessee home:

In June we had a new forest canopy, but the trees had to go to the bank and take out a loan to produce it. They could photosynthesize, but fruits and seeds were lost. The summer and fall commenced dry and hot. Lake levels dropped, and water supplies throughout the region were overtaxed. We were in the bull's-eye on the drought map of the Southeast. I watered the brown and dying azaleas with dishwater. The fall of 2007 was a fall without. I swept no acorns from the front walk. No local apples were available. No berries, no rosehips—none. Sparrows looked for a few grass seeds along the roadways. Squirrels and birds used the seed feeders heavily. Millipedes and orb-weaver spiders were nowhere to be found. The deer, small and thin-sided, approached closer than usual and ate every banana peel I tossed out, including the labels.

The voices in Thoreau's Legacy are important ones - they speak about everyday things that many have noticed without interpreting. They talk about how to make a difference and about the differences that have already been made. While it is certainly not Thoreau, it is an important - and easy - book to read. It is available free online at Thoreau's Legacy: American Stories on Global Warming. Each essay is on its own page, and no one essay will take you longer than five minutes to read. Every one of them will stay with you for far more than five minutes, though. Go read it. Bookmark it so you can share it and return to it again and again.