I just learned that The Forest Unseen is now in its second printing, which is great news. I know that the enthusiasm of many of the followers of this blog is part of the reason for this success: thank you. A paperback version will be coming out in spring of 2013.

Some recent reviews include one in the NRDC’s magazine, OnEarth, and inclusion in John Sutherland’s essay about the direction of modern “nature writing” in the Financial Times. I was particularly honored to be included in this essay alongside authors whose work I greatly admire.

I am in Santa Cruz, CA, today giving a talk at UCSC. Banana slugs are underfoot, ravens overhead, and redwoods surround buildings on campus. What passes for rain in these parts is falling outside, what Tennesseans might call a vigorous, organized mist; apparently this may be the only precipitation until the autumn.

Thanks to a kind invitation from my friends and colleagues at The Land Trust for Tennessee, I was able to attend a meeting today with Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior. The meeting was focused on the top priorities in the state of Tennessee under the Obama administration’s America’s Great Outdoors program. This program is focused on land and water conservation and on providing access to “the outdoors,” especially in urban areas. Other attendees included representatives from local, state, and federal agencies and offices; conservation NGOs; foundations; and a few other academics.

The specific projects under discussion were: (1) the proposed new National Wildlife Refuge in the Paint Rock River watershed (just south of Sewanee), (2) the Tennessee Riverwalk in Chattanooga, and (3) the Harpeth River project in and around Franklin. Background information the first two projects is here; the third is described here.

In all three cases, private donors, NGOs, and local, state, and federal agencies have worked together to make long-term plans that enhance both “the environment” and human well-being. In the case of the Paint Rock, one of the Eastern U.S.’s crown jewels (if you’ll excuse the royalist metaphor in this republic) of biodiversity would be protected, with the additional benefit of providing public access (including hunting) to large areas of unfragmented forest, access that is becoming harder and harder to secure as the last remaining “open” lands get closed off by development and other pressures. I am delighted that this project has received such high priority — it would be a major win for the people of Tennessee and Alabama (and for the world‘s biodiversity — few places can rival the Paint Rock River).

The other two projects are in more urban areas. The first of these involves continuing the Riverwalk in Chattanooga, extending it into lower-income areas and completing the original plan for interconnecting different parts of the city. I’ve ridden this fabulous walkway many times on my bike and I am continually impressed by how many people use the walkway, how diverse their backgrounds seem to be, and how flat-out delightful it is to pedal along the Tennessee River for miles. I know less about the Harpeth River project, but when it is complete (after dam removal, for one), it will restore the river to an entirely free-flowing state, one of the few such rivers in Tennessee. In addition, the project will provide public access, assist with riverbank restoration, and integrate with the freshwater supply in Franklin. This project is being looked to as an example for how other communities can move forward with river restoration and increased quality of life for human communities along rivers (i.e., most of our towns and cities).

Salazar impressed me with his genial nature, his ability to remember names in a room of fifty new people, and his careful questions, designed both to affirm the good in these projects and to sniff out without undue fuss any hint of problems. I can’t say that I agree with his positions on some issues, but I came away understanding a little bit more about what it takes to get good work done in complex political contexts.

Kudos to the amazing folks at The Land Trust for Tennessee for arranging this meeting on very, very short notice. Salazar’s schedule allows literally just hours to get things together (his full-time schedule man looked kinda worn out…).

When I first heard about the upcoming transit of the planet Venus across the sun, I confess that my first thought was: ho-hum, kinda interesting but planets and stars move around all the time, so what if Venus swings across the face of the sun? Then I listened to the interview with Andrea Wulf on the Nature podcast (direct link to the interview is here; the podcast is also on iTunes, etc). How wrong I was in my initial judgment (which grew entirely from my ignorance — the world is only a ho-hum place when your head is buried in the sands of your own limitations).

The transit will certainly be less dramatic than lunar and solar eclipses, but unless any of us are planning to be around in 2125, this is our only shot. But rarity is not the main attraction. When the little dark disc of Venus hits the sun, we’ll be able to witness a natural phenomenon that changed the shape of the world of ideas. Now that is worth paying attention to.

The two transits in the 18th century — in 1761 and 1769 — allowed astronomers to estimate the distance of the sun from the Earth. This was a major achievement, made possible first by the heliocentric view of the solar system (unless you assume that the planets orbit around the sun, your trigonometry is very wrong) and, second, by the calculations of Edmond Halley (of comet fame) who correctly predicted in 1716 that Venus’ transit would offer an excellent alignment of celestial angles, allowing astronomers to get an accurate estimate of the distance to the sun from the Earth (this video has a great overview of how these estimates are made; in this case, we’re using parallax).

Halley did not just point out the scientific potential latent in Venus’ transit, he developed a detailed plan for how to take advantage of this opportunity, although he knew that he would be dead by the time the transit happened. The plan was necessary because an accurate estimate of the distance depended on timing the transit from multiple points on the Earth’s surface, preferably with these points being spread far apart (triangulation works best when the two people conducting the measurement are located at some distance from each other). And so this transit became the motivating force behind large, government-funded, collaborative international expeditions. Astronomers trekked to far-flung places with huge boxes of gear, then hoped for a clear day. Never before had such an enterprise been undertaken and science was forever changed by the success of the project. It is not too much of a stretch to say that the intellectual history of the West was nudged by this event: the measurement of the distance to the sun through the use of scientific principles and predictions was both a product of the Enlightenment and a spur to its further development. So let’s go out on June 5th and pay homage.

The website transitofvenus.org has much useful information about the upcoming event, including how to view the event without being blinded by Enlightenment (a useful skill, especially for those at liberal arts colleges). If you have binoculars, use them to project an image of the sun onto paper (as shown here), being careful not to look at the sun through the binocs — ouch.

I found the maps on the site particularly helpful:

Map showing where and when you can see the transit (from transitofvenus.org)

For a more precise indication of when you should look, enter your location here. You’ll get a nice set of times and mock-ups of what the transit should look like. Here are the data for Sewanee, TN, where the transit will be visible from 5pm until the sun goes down:

And Santa Cruz, CA (where I’ll be — please, please let it be “sunny California”):

Last, for some musical accompaniment for the event, John Philip Sousa’s Transit of Venus March (who knew?) might be suitable (available in high school bandwidth here).

I’m “reblogging” this thoughtful and moving Memorial Day post from my friend and colleague Chris McDonough. I’ll add that the poppy referred to in the poems of WWI is the European poppy, Papaver rhoeas, a annual plant that specializes on colonizing disturbed soils. It therefore bloomed all over the bombed-out landscape of Northern Europe during the war. The plant is still a successful “weed” in European grain fields; these days, the “war” is against herbicide-resistant varieties of poppy: progress of a kind, surely.

This week I’ve been reading Rachel Carson in preparation for a short essay that I’m working on. Today is her birthday, so I thought I’d post a few quotes from her work. She is a fabulous writer, channeling her extraordinary passion through thoughtful metaphor and confident but understated prose. The quotes come from her article “Help your child to wonder” which ran in Woman’s Home Companion in 1956. I had not read this article before; it is not widely reprinted, but is full of gems. Thankfully, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Conservation Library has a scanned pdf available of the original.

“Out there, just at the edge of where-we-couldn’t-see, big waves were thundering in, dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of froth at us. Together we laughed for pure joy – he a baby meeting for the first time the wild tumult of Oceanus, I with the salt of half a lifetime of sea love in me.”

“If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

“It is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.”

When she received the  National Book Award in 1952, she said: “The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.”