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A collection of loosely-knit links. Not about blackbirds.
1. blackbird
Flickr CC image by Striatic (Bryan Partington)
2. Pale Blue Dot: An Alien View of Earth
Twenty years ago last week, NASA’s Voyager 1 sent back this photo from four billion miles away. From NPR.
“It was just a little dot, about two pixels big, three big,” [Candace Hansen-Koharchek] says. “So not very large.”
But this was the Earth — seen as no human had ever seen it before.
…
The late astronomer Carl Sagan eloquently tried to express how he felt about this photo in his book Pale Blue Dot:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
See also: Audio Gallery: Views Of Earth From The Middle Ages To The Space Age
3. “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.”
Jenny Price’s illuminating essay, reprinted in The Believer, weaves together the worlds of nature writing and Los Angeles.
To say there’s no nature in cities is a convenient way of seeing if I like being a nature lover and environmentalist but don’t want to give up any of my stuff. We cherish nature as an idea of wildness while losing track of the real nature in our very houses. We flee to wild nature as a haven from high-tech industrial urban life, but refuse to see that we madly use and transform wild nature to sustain the exact life from which we seek retreat. We make sacred our encounters with wild nature but thereby desacralize all other encounters. Or in other words, if we cannot clearly understand cities and our lives within them unless we keep track of our connections to nature, still there may be some basic things we prefer not to see and understand.
Ideally, if there’s any one argument I could persuade you of, it’s that our foundational nature stories should see and cherish our mundane, economic, utilitarian, daily encounters with nature—so that what car you drive and how you get your water and how you build a house should be transparent acts that are as sacred as hiking to the top of Point Mugu in the northern Santa Monica Mountains and gazing out over the Pacific Ocean to watch the dolphins leap, the ducks float, and the sun set.
…
Nature stories have been more than key L.A. stories. They’ve been the L.A. stories. They’re the driving stories in the city we use to think. It’s ironic, isn’t it? Los Angeles, which symbolizes the city as antinature, really has long flourished as a mecca for thinking and writing about nature, and for telling this powerful story in particular that nature writing has so dedicatedly perpetuated.
(via Good)
4. America’s Vanishing Silent Spaces
Newsweek interviews audio ecologist Gordon Hempton, author (with John Grossman) of One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World.
Why should we care about silence?
It has become an increasingly rare experience to be in nature as our distant ancestors were. Even in our national parks today, despite laws to protect them, you are much more likely to be hearing noise pollution, particularly overhead aircraft, than you are to be hearing only the native sounds of the land. Yet to be in a naturally silent place is as essential today as it was to our distant ancestors. Besides spending time away from the damaging noise impacts present at our workplace, neighborhoods, and homes, we are given the opportunity not only to heal but discover something incredible—the presence of life, interwoven! Do you know what it sounds like to listen for 20 miles in every direction? That is more than 1,000 square miles. When I listen to a naturally silent place and hear nature at its most natural, it is no longer merely sound; it is music. And like all music, good or bad, it affects us deeply.
See also: onesquareinch.org
5. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
from Wallace Stevens’ famous poem
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
See also Corey Finger’s piece on “Thirteen Ways…” in the blog, 10,000 Birds.
Credits: NASA/JPL (Pale Blue Dot); Graphic from One Square Inch of Silence (“Blanket of Noise” map)
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