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A football field every 45 minutes

Isle de Jean Charles

Isle de Jean Charles

John D. Sutter’s column ‘There’s no more land’ struck home for me about global warming and sea level rise.

It’s not that Sutter offers new data or analysis on sea level rise per se. There is plenty of that already. For example, Dahr Jamail’s excellent recent summary ‘Climate disruption in overdrive: Submerged cities and melting that “feeds on Itself”‘ is enough to ruin whatever you might imagine could be a good day. It starts with this

the planet is warming a stunning 50 times faster than when it comes out of an ice age. The implications of the rapidity of this warming, for those who care to digest it emotionally, are horrifying…. even if carbon reduction targets are achieved and the planet’s temperature is kept below the 2 degree Celsius warming threshold, sea-level rise will still inundate major coastal cities around the world, forcing one-fifth of the total world population of humans to migrate away from the coasts.

and goes downhill from there.

But Sutter shows what dreary statistics can mean for ordinary lives:

Isle de Jean Charles, the mostly French-speaking, Native American community where Billiot [Wenceslaus Billiot, an 88-year-old born on the island] lives, once was about the size of Manhattan. Now, it’s about a third of Central Park.

The coastal island has lost 98% of its land since 1955.

And what’s left is going fast.

“I don’t know how long we’re going to stay here,” Billiot told me.

“If a hurricane comes, we’re wide open.

“There’s no more land.”

The island is losing a football field chunk of land every 45 minutes. Also see Lauren Zanolli’s ‘Louisiana’s vanishing island: the climate ‘refugees’ resettling for $52m’.

I’ve never been to Isle de Jean Charles, but have traveled in that area just south of New Orleans. Susan and I once camped in a tent at Grand Isle State Park. We feasted on Gulf shrimp we bought directly off a trawler. It’s a rare and magical place to visit.

The website for the island/town says:

For the people of Isle de Jean Charles, the island is more than simply a place to live. It is the epicenter of our people and traditions. It is where our ancestors cultivated what has become a unique part of Louisiana culture. Today, the land that has sustained us for generations is vanishing before our eyes.  Our tribal lands are plagued with a host of environmental problems — coastal erosion, lack of soil renewal, oil company and government canals, and a rising sea level — which are threatening our way of life on this gradually shrinking island.

The land’s beauty is enhanced by the feeling of its impermanence, whether because of hurricanes or natural changes in estuaries and dunes. If I were typesetting the island, I’d look for a wispy font with a small type size.

Isle de Jean Charles

Bayous and estuaries south of New Orleans

But the fact of the impermanence has now been written in 96 point bold by the actions of humans rapidly destroying the land. Channeling the river, adding dams and levees, drilling for and transporting oil, developing resort communities, and other activities have all played their part, but stronger hurricanes and sea level rise are the final blows.

Our politicians seem happy to stay in blissful ignorance of all this (see ‘In their own words: 2016 presidential candidates on climate change’). Republican leaders are actually in denial and Democrats make tepid statements without programs for meaningful change. Naomi Klein writes that to make those changes, “some powerful interests will have to lose”:

A president willing to inflict these losses on fossil-fuel companies and their allies needs to be more than just not actively corrupt. That president needs to be up for the fight of the century—and absolutely clear about which side must win. Looking at the Democratic primary, there can be no doubt about who is best suited to rise to this historic moment.

For Klein, Bernie Sanders is the one best suited for that rise. But could anyone who stands up to the fossil-fuel companies ever be elected President? More importantly, could they stand up to the fossil fuel users, meaning us?

To win “the fight of the century” many more people need to connect the larger processes of human-induced climate change to the particulars of places like Isle de Jean Charles, and further, to connect that to the choices we make about lifestyle and to what we value.

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The place of freedom

William Hubbard House

William Hubbard House, Ashtabula, OH

Place is both the barrier to and the enabler of freedom. The freedom of a vacation comes from its being a getaway, but few things feel less free than totally losing a sense of place while traveling in a strange land.

That dual nature applies to more significant experiences as well, as I reflected on seeing the William Hubbard House in Ashtabula, Ohio.

Hubbard moved to Ashtabula from Holland Patent, New York, around 1834. (I could never have predicted that without any planning we’d pass through both of those small places, set on back roads 330 miles apart, on the same day.)

Hubbard became involved in the local antislavery society and town politics. His house was a strategic location for the Underground Railroad, set on the shore of Lake Erie and with his own ferry port nearby. His house was the last stop before a boat ride across the lake to Canada.

Runaway slaves and conductors on the Underground Railroad referred to his home as “Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard” or “The Great Emporium.” It is not known how many slaves Hubbard helped gain their freedom, but records suggest that he housed 39 slaves on one occasion.

Lake Erie, and the final stop

Lake Erie, and the final stop

It was both inspiring and humbling to stand beside the Hubbard home with the vast expanse of Lake Erie and unseen Canada beyond. One can read about the many Underground Railroad locations and the heroic journeys that people took to gain their freedom, but encountering the two-story house, the lake, the Ashtabula river leading to the ferry port, the antebellum era town buildings, and the woods nearby made the bare plotline come alive.

Being there made the slaves’ escape from a place of misery to a place of hope just a little more tangible. I wondered how anyone could be there and not have their sympathy enlarged. Or how they could think about that 19th century quest for freedom and talk so easily (as some Presidential candidates do) about denying freedom to victims of violence and oppression in the Middle East, Central America, or other places today.

In The Particularities of Place (see also Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America (2014, edited by Wilfred M. McClay and Ted V. McAllister), Wilfred M. McClay writes,

We embrace freedom because we believe fervently in the fullest breadth of individual human possibility, and share a deep conviction that no one’s horizons in life should be dictated by the conditions of his or her birth. Nothing is more quintessentially American than that conviction. But…. one’s place of origin is seen as an impediment, something to be overcome. “Place” may even point toward notions of social hierarchy that Americans generally find anathema…the idea of “knowing your place” was favored by advocates of racial segregation and the subordination of women.

William Still, "Father of the Underground Railroad"

William Still, “Father of the Underground Railroad”

The plantations were a place that denied not only freedom per se, but the full “breadth of individual human possibility.” Yet the places of the Underground Railroad and the new River Jordan, expanded that possibility.

McClay goes on to see a renewed need for place today:

We now have a new set of problems, born of the pathologies engendered precisely by our achievements. Something is now seriously out of balance in the way we live…. it can be argued that, like it or not, we must recover a more durable and vibrant sense of place if we are to preserve the healthy dynamism of our society as it now exists, and promote the highest measure of human happiness and flourishing.

In seeking to escape from one place, slaves needed to maintain a sense of others. This included both some idea of a lost homeland and a vision of that Railroad leading to a new place of freedom. McClay quotes from William Leach’s Country of Exiles:

People require a firm sense of place so they can dare to take risks. A society whose common store of memories has been beaten down or shattered is open to further disruption; for such a society cannot defend or protect itself from the stronger incursions of those who know what they want and how to get it.

I’m happy that places such as the Hubbard House have been preserved, to enable a continuity of place, which in turn gives us a human connection across very different life experiences. Visiting it gave me a richer sense of the place in which I live.

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Highlander Center

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In the midst of a long car trip, we stopped to visit the Highlander Research and Education Center near New Market, Tennessee. It was just a short visit, since we had many miles to go. Also, the workshop and conference areas were in use, so our options were limited.

In spite of all that, I was very happy that we could make the time to see it. I’d known about the Highlander Folk School for many years, through Myles Horton’s books and other writing. But I also knew that the state of Tennessee had revoked Highlander’s charter and confiscated the school’s land and property.(in 1961) and that Horton had died in 1990. I hadn’t kept up with all the good work that the Center continued to do.

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After two major moves, the Highlander Center came to its present site in 1971. It sits atop Bay’s Mountain in the Tennessee River Valley, looking across to the Great Smoky Mountains.

The Workshop Center is home to organizing and leadership development, workshops on civil rights, immigrant communities, and economic justice. Projects have ranged from connecting communities around the world affected by industrial chemical pollution to LGBTQ rights.

In the early years (1930s-40s) the focus was on building a unified Labor movement. Later (1950s-60s) Highlander helped incubate the SNCC and Mississippi Freedom Summer. Ralph Abernathy, Rosa Parks, Pete Seeger, and Martin Luther King were among the participants.

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Moving into the1970s-90s there was an increasing focus on land issues, environment, and global economics. This meant more international connections and collaborations. In the present century there has been even more emphasis on developing tools and connecting people and organizations. Highlander has also expanded work with immigrant communities.

The Resource Center is home to archives, book shop, and library. Within a small wooden building is a rich history of progressive movements over eight decades in Appalachia, the US, and worldwide.

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The activities of the Highlander Center are diverse. But they’re well symbolized through the metaphor of a conversation with neighbors, all sitting in rocking chairs, arranged in a circle.

Those chairs and that circle are real. The open dialogue across different backgrounds and experiences that they imply is the first step in enacting positive change.

We stayed that night in Fall Creek Falls State Park, not too far to the west of the Center. The Park is named for the highest plunge waterfall east of the Mississippi. The nearby Piney Creek Falls are even more beautiful.

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Namskaket Creek

On the day after Christmas Stephen and I decided to venture out. Seeing no snow, we did the best we could by a short canoe trip on Namskaket Creek in Brewster.

To get to the creek, we made a short portage on the Cape Cod Rail Trail. Another option would have been to launch in the bay at Skaket or Crosby Lane beach.

The whole journey, including a PB&J lunch, took only four hours, with about half of that paddling. It was still a bit of an adventure, since it wasn’t easy to find our way through the salt marsh and occasionally we had to fight the wind. But the weather was perfect and the birds were joyous. The mix of forest, marsh, beach, briny water and ocean was unbeatable.

Satellite view
Portage on the CC Rail Trail
Savoring the day
Namskaket Marsh
Miniature Cape Cod
Mouth of Namskaket Creek
Enjoying Christmas(?) weather
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Can anything be done?

Earthquake response in Nepal

Earthquake response in Nepal

When we think about problems such as intolerance, economic justice, or climate change, should we focus on the local or the global? the short-term or the long-term? the social or the technical? Questions such as these recur in ways that often lead to discouragement, including the feeling that nothing can be done on any problem at any level.

Naomi Klein discussed this in last June’s College of the Atlantic commencement address, Climate Change Is a Crisis We Can Only Solve Together. She writes, “the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts.” There must be “a large, organized, and focused movement.” And yet, she goes on to say, local activism is critical: It’s winning big fights, showing us what the future looks and feels like, and inspiring bigger examples. In short, we need both.

What Klein says makes a lot of sense. But it’s often hard to find examples that bridge between the local and the global, the immediate need and the needed long-term change, or between social and organizational work and technological fixes.

Open air mapping, when buildings were unsafe

Open air mapping, when buildings were unsafe

Yesterday at MIT, Nama Budhathoki gave an inspiring talk on the work of Kathmandu Living Labs. It was titled: Nepal’s Digital Innovation for Social Good: Looking Back to the April Earthquake. His project offers such an example.

KLL uses online mapping to address a wide variety of social challenges. This can be seen most dramatically in the timeline of KLL’s response to the April 25 earthquake in Nepal. For an excellent summary of their work, see Naomi Bloch’s article GIS & the Global Community: Humanitarian Mapping.

Through KLL, a farmer in a remote Nepalese village can integrate his local knowledge of a field or stream with that of an engineer at MIT. People in Nepal, despite their own challenges, can become among the largest contributors to relief efforts following Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. Detailed information about a school can be used to influence government policies and actions. This connecting across levels or communities is something many people talk about but few have shown how to achieve.

There are many reasons for KLL’s success, including the dedication of Nama and his team. But what also seems clear is that KLL offers remarkable models for how people can work together to achieve common good.

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Elogio de la Sombra

The Friends of wellfleet Library presented another in its Favorite Poems series yesterday, with Mort Inger ably hosting.

My own contribution was from one of my favorite writers, Jorge Luis Borges. Suzanne Jill Levine calls him “the most important writer of the 20th Century,” an assertion supported by Jane Ciabattari in a BBC article last year.

I became fascinated with Borges when I was in high school, the time that his first book-length publications began to appear in English (Ficciones and Labyrinths). His works wandered across a labyrinth of genres, including romance, mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, metafiction, philosophy, literature, and language. His interest in time challenged my own dissertation work on time and formal logic.

I like other musings of Borges on philosophical issues, including this:

Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.

Borges was also a translator of English, French, German, Old English, and Old Norse into Spanish. He translated Oscar Wilde’s story “The Happy Prince” at the age of nine. And his ideas about translation are even more relevant today. He saw language as a creative force that shaped us as much as we it. I think that he’d want me to learn better Spanish, but would also support the fact that nearly all my reading of his work is in translation. I know at least one Borges.

His work on time and language come together in his ideas about literary precursors:

the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; …not all of them resemble each other….if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist….The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors.

Despite being acknowledged by many as an outstanding, even the (or one of the) most important writers of the last century, Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize. He writes:

Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me.

In 1955, after Peron was deposed, he became Director of the National Library of Argentina. Soon thereafter he became blind. He focused on poetry, since he could memorize an entire work and keep it in memory until he had perfected it.

No one should read self-pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God; who with such splendid irony,
Granted me books and night at one touch
–Seven Nights, 1984

A decade or so later, when he was exactly my age now, Borges published a collection of poems, Elogio de la Sombra (In Praise of Darkness). Of the same name, the last poem in the book, is the one I read yesterday:

In Praise of Darkness (1969/1974)

Old age (the name that others give it) can be the time of our greatest bliss. The animal has died or almost died. The man and his spirit remain.
I live among vague, luminous shapes that are not darkness yet.
Buenos Aires,
whose edges disintegrated
into the endless plain,
has gone back to being the Recoleta, the Retiro,
the nondescript streets of the Once,
and the rickety old houses
we still call the South.
In my life there were always too many things.
Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes in order to think; Time has been my Democritus.
This penumbra is slow and does not pain me;
it flows down a gentle slope,
resembling eternity.
My friends have no faces,
women are what they were so many years ago,
these corners could be other corners,
there are no letters on the pages of books.
All this should frighten me,
but it is a sweetness, a return.
Of the generations of texts on earth
I will have read only a few-
the ones that I keep reading in my memory, reading and transforming.
From South, East, West, and North
the paths converge that have led me
to my secret center.
Those paths were echoes and footsteps,
women, men, death-throes, resurrections,
days and nights,
dreams and half-wakeful dreams,
every inmost moment of yesterday
and all the yesterdays of the world,
the Dane’s staunch sword and the Persian’s moon, the acts of the dead,
shared love, and words,
Emerson and snow, so many things.
Now I can forget them. I reach my center
my algebra and my key,
my mirror.
Soon I will know who I am.

–Tr. Norman Thomas di Giovanni

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A conference in Taipei

The conference in Taipei a little over a week ago was really two-in-one. It combined “Museums in Everyday Life” with “Educational and Communication Technology Transforms the Future.” The museum part meant that we had tours of several local museums as part of the conference activities, rather than requiring one to skip sessions.

At the end, there was a wonderful dinner with Taiwanese specialities at Qingtian 76 (also see), a Japanese-styled building that had once been the residence for National Taiwan University professors and is now an excellent and charming restaurant.

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Reconnecting with students

There were many special aspects for me of a recent trip to Taiwan, including the countryside, Taipei, interesting conferences on museums in everyday life and technology in education, university visits, wonderful food, and museums.

Alex at Wistaria Tea House (紫藤廬; Zǐténg Lú)

Alex at Wistaria Tea House (紫藤廬; Zǐténg Lú)

Several of my students from Taiwan now live in the US, Canada, and other places, but many have returned to Taiwan to work and live. Reconnecting with them was a special treat, especially since some had to travel a long distance to meet.

Alex and Shihkuan introduced Susan and me to Taipei, including the Wistaria (or Wisteria) Tea House. This is a Japanese-style wooden house built in the 1920s, which is named for three wisteria vines planted in the front courtyard. The house served as a residence for the Governor-General of Taiwan under Japanese rule prior to 1945. It became a teahouse and was known as a venue for political dissidents during the 1980s. It continues as a meeting place for literati, artists, and academics and was used for the filming of Eat Drink Man Woman.

Shihkuan, Alex

Shihkuan, Alex

We had a wonderful lunch there and enjoyed a Gongfu cha (“making tea with effort”) ceremony. I proved to be the clumsiest at pouring tea properly.

In the evenings, I was fortunate to have dinners in excellent Taiwanese restaurants with many former doctoral students.

Shihkuan, Ruey-chuan, Yuangshan, Hsiu-Hsiang

Shihkuan, Ruey-chuan, Yuangshan, Hsiu-Hsiang

Yu-Hua, Min-Ling, Shihkuan, Yulan

Yu-Hua, Min-Ling, Shihkuan, Yulan

Yuangshan & family

Yuangshan & family

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East Coast adventure

After the bustle of Taipei, Taiwan, it’s refreshing to explore the East Coast of Taiwan.

Coastal rock formations, gorges, waterfalls, mountains, and other natural wonders are interlaced with signs of still vibrant indigenous cultures. I saw Formosan rock macaques, boars, and countless birds and butterflies in the wild.

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My Dad

Bertram Camp Bruce

Bertram Camp Bruce

Today is the centennial of my father’s birth. He lived not much over half of that century, a period that has grown shorter in my eyes with each passing year.

Dad loved music in many forms–opera, chamber, symphonic, piano, vocal, jazz, Big Band, and more. Around 1950, he opened Bruce Piano Company. The store sold Steinways and provided pianos for performers visiting the Fort Worth Symphony and Opera.

We often argued during the years that were to be his last and my first as a nominal adult. There were the perennial favorites of politics and religion, but special features such as how I didn’t understand what it meant to grow up in the Great Depression, what was wrong with contemporary pop music, and how I would benefit from more direction in my life.

I’m stubborn like Dad was, so my views probably haven’t changed much since then. Still, I’d give a lot to have the briefest time with him again, even if it were an argument. I might even be able to listen better.

My Dad was a good husband, father, friend, and community member. At his funeral, our minister quoted Jesus, “The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth that which is good.”

On the whole, I have fond memories and few regrets. However, one big regret is that he knew his children only as teenagers, and never met any of his six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. I know that he would have been very proud of all of them, and that they would have richer lives knowing him.