Sixty Days and Counting,
by Kim Stanley Robinson.

I waited for the release of Kim Stanley Robinson’s new book, Sixty Days and Counting, like a computer geek awaiting the release of the PS3: standing outside the door of the store, in the snow, having cleared my calendar for a few days so I could dive right in.

I’m a fan of Robinson’s voluminous work because environmental themes usually animate the characters and move the plot. The “Three Californias” trilogy presented “future histories” with different environmental, technical, and social scenarios, while the Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning “Mars” trilogy traced that planet’s transformation from science station to corporate colony to autonomous world. Antarctica explored the possible impacts of climate change and eco-terrorism while examining various modes of interacting with the harsh landscape.

Antarctica.

Sixty Days and Counting is the final book in the “Capitol Code” trilogy, whose characters are experiencing and trying to mitigate the impacts of climate change in the near future. Charlie Quibler works part-time from home as an environmental policy advisor to Senator Phil Chase while caring for his feisty toddler, Joe, and school-aged Nick. Anna Quibler runs the bioinformatics division at the National Science Foundation, where she works with Frank Vanderwal, a scientist’s scientist on loan to NSF from his faculty post at the University of California San Diego.

In Forty Signs of Rain, the first book in the trilogy, Anna befriends four Tibetan refugees who move into office space at NSF. Having fled Chinese human-rights abuses, the Tibetans found quasi-autonomy on the island of Khembalung, but it is threatened by climate change-induced rising sea levels. The Tibetans have come to D.C. to lobby for social and environmental justice.

Forty Signs of Rain.

Senator Chase brushes off the Tibetans and dismantles Charlie’s omnibus environmental bill, while Frank becomes disenchanted by NSF’s inability to act on any of the obvious climate-protection strategies suggested by scientific research. The possibility of meaningful action emerges when Katrina-style flooding hits D.C. In Fifty Degrees Below, the sense of urgency is enhanced when fresh water dumped into the north Atlantic from the thawing Arctic ice cap causes the Gulf Stream to fail. During the ensuing brutal winter, the National Science Foundation moves forward with aggressive research and mitigation steps, including restarting the Gulf Stream’s thermohaline cycle. (“Putting salt in the ocean,” one of the Tibetans quips ironically. “Good idea.”)

Sixty Days and Counting picks up the story as Senator Chase is elected president. His inaugural address sounds like Al Gore on steroids reading a Kucinich script: “For the sake of climate stabilization, there must be population stabilization; and for there to be population stabilization, justice must prevail.”

Fifty Degrees Below.

Throughout the series, Robinson seamlessly weaves science, politics, and spirituality into a compelling story whose characters practically come to life. While reading, I heard a guest on NPR’s Talk of the Nation Science Friday contend that climate change is too expensive to address. I desperately wanted to call in and quote Frank Vanderwal: “Say it cost a trillion dollars to install clean-energy generators and change out the transport fleet. Weigh that against the financial benefit to civilization of continuing with approximately the [same] sea level, the weather, the biosphere support, etc.; also the difficult-to calculate-in-dollars but undoubtedly huge benefit of avoiding a great deal of human suffering … Two trillion dollars would not be more than three or four years of the Pentagon’s budget … [we] could shift to clean power and transport so cheaply relative to the total economy.” I rarely feel compelled to cite fictional characters on radio call-in shows, but Robinson’s writing always gets under my skin this way.

Robinson also manages to actually dramatize sustainable living: the Quiblers in an egalitarian and somewhat nontraditional nuclear family in a suburban home (for now), Frank as a neo-Paleolithic freegan, the Tibetans in community. He even captures mundane moments in the life of an enviro-geek: “Back in his office, therefore, Frank would sit at his desk, staring at his list of Things To Do … Ordinarily the list would be enough to distract anyone. Its length and difficulty made it all by itself a kind of blow to the head. It induced an awe so great that it resembled apathy … And as more disasters blasted into the world, their Things To Do list would lengthen.”

In his essay “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change: Terraforming Earth,” Robinson indicates that he sees the series as comic, in that “the discrepancy between what we say and what we do, what we intend and what we achieve, is always partly comic.” Sixty Days and Counting isn’t quite a comedy of manners, which my old handbook of literature insists “depicts daily life without coming to grips with questions of good and evil.” Perhaps it’s a new genre — a comedy of catastrophe that recognizes that how we live our daily lives does bring us to grips with questions of good and evil. And without adding any spoilers, I can say that Sixty Days does satisfyingly end as Robinson predicted in his essay: “with the traditional comic ending — dancing, singing, marriage, children all happy.”

As an environmentalist who used to work for nuns, I’m fascinated by other enviros’ views of religion. Many fear or shun religious practice, and yet religious imagery and themes are prevalent throughout environmental thought, as is evident in a handful of book titles from recent years: The Ecology of Eden, Tinkering with Eden, God’s Last Offer, And the Waters Turned to Blood.

Reinventing Eden
By Carolyn Merchant,
Routledge, 304 pages, April 2003

In Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture, Carolyn Merchant, an environmental historian at the University of California at Berkeley, analyzes how one religious theme — the Christian interpretation of the Genesis story — has shaped worldviews through history, both mainstream Western views and environmental thinking. The book makes fascinating reading, and her insights might help environmentalists frame more effective messages for the public at large.

The Christian take on Genesis as the story of a fall from grace is familiar to most of us. In “Extracts from Adam’s Diary,” Mark Twain sums it up:

“[Eve] has taken up with a snake now. The other animals are glad, for she was always experimenting with them and bothering them, and I am glad, because the snake talks, and this enables me to get a rest. She says the snake advises her to try the fruit of that tree, and says the result will be a great and fine and noble education … I advised her to keep away from the tree. She said she wouldn’t. I forsee [sic] trouble. Will emigrate.”

Of course, Eve ate the fruit, trouble ensued, both emigrated, and, Merchant argues, the attempt to return to Eden has been the driving force behind Western culture ever since.

Merchant traces this theme through the works of the usual suspects from Intro to Humanities: Plato, Hesiod, Ovid, Virgil, Dante, Newton. In time, overtly religious language was superseded by that of secular science, but Merchant demonstrates that the underlying story remained largely the same when told by Bacon, Locke, and Descartes.

Before the fall.

While classical and medieval philosophers envisioned a spiritual return to Eden, Enlightenment thinkers began to imagine that Eden could be recreated physically — in the Americas. Most Europeans saw the land as capable of being turned into Eden through human (specifically male) ingenuity. Paradise could be reinvented by “a heroic Adam acting to improve a nature depicted variously as a virgin, fallen, or fruitful Eve.” Merchant provides many examples of text and paintings in which the land of the New World is depicted as a female in need of redemption through, shall we say, cultivation. Take the words of colonist Thomas Morton, who in 1632 compared New England to a “faire virgin longing to be sped and meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed. Her fruitfull wombe not being enjoyed is like a glorious tombe.”

Meanwhile, an emerging environmental counter-narrative saw the land as already Edenic, while human presence and efforts to “improve” it were causing a slow but steady fall. As Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden, Walden Pond was already in existence … and covered with myriads of ducks, geese, which had not heard of the fall.”

But even the environmentalist narrative envisions recovering Eden only for a privileged few white men. John Muir’s vision of Edenic national parks required the removal of native people from their lands.

Merchant demonstrates that both environmentalist and mainstream stories stemming from the fall have been detrimental to women and people of color. She writes, “With the taming of wilderness, the removal of ‘savages’ and ‘wild men’ and the repression of blacks, the American Eden had become a colonized Eden. People of privilege were inside the garden, colonized minorities outside it or on its margins.”

Some of her conclusions may be too far-reaching. I wasn’t convinced that the notion of upward progress in Western thought always equates to desire for a “return” to the garden. And the Christian story of the imminent end of the world in a fiery apocalypse has had a greater impact on environmental policy — particularly under James Watt, Reagan’s controversial interior secretary, and perhaps under the current administration as well — than any story of a return to Eden.

Still, Merchant’s analysis is compelling, particularly if enviros use it consciously to craft more effective environmental messages. The current enviro frame is: Eden existed, we screwed it up, we’re still falling, and things are getting worse. Think of the nonstop news of climate change, extinction, habitat loss, and harm to human health. It’s like being stuck in endless reruns of The Empire Strikes Back or The Two Towers. The mainstream frame, on the other hand, says that while things were bad there for a while, we’ve made a lot of progress through innovation, technology, and hard work, and we’re already experiencing the Return of the Jedi or the King — or Eden.

The mainstream story is obviously more hopeful and compelling. In a sense, this is a complicated way of saying you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. But it may help enviros recognize that focusing on portraying a positive vision is not just a Pollyanna copout, but a principled and savvy way to tap into the cultural power of this story.

I leave it to the communications and marketing professionals among us to figure out what this would look like in practice, but one obvious step is to focus not on the fall but on the recovery. We could paint a powerful picture of our version of a return to Eden, which would occur via foot, bicycle, and hybrid public transit, in cities and on farms as well as in wilderness areas and parks, powered by clean energy, and inclusive of women, people of color, and all communities around the globe.

You’ll have to forgive the staid title: Right from the start, The Farm as Natural Habitat: Reconnecting Food Systems with Ecosystems is thoroughly Midwestern in tone — reserved, practical, and down-to-earth. Edited by long-time sustainable-agriculture advocates Dana and Laura Jackson, a mother-daughter team, the essays collected here describe farming practices that mimic and protect natural systems. But if the voice is mild, the message is urgent: Environmentalists must build ties with farmers if we are to grow food without destroying topsoil, poisoning our air and water, and killing wildlife.

The Farm as Natural
Habitat By Dana and
Laura Jackson Island
Press, 250 pages, 2002

The Farm as Natural Habitat begins by noting that the American Midwest is too often abandoned as our national “ecological sacrifice area.” Environmentalists have ignored agricultural lands, write the Jacksons, because they believe that nature is found in parks, not on farms in square states whose names begin with vowels — or perhaps because they have bought into the notion that industrial agriculture is a necessary evil if we are to have enough food to eat. But there is no need to sacrifice the nation’s heartland to feed its people: As Laura Jackson writes in “Restoring Prairie Processes to Farmlands,” “There is a good deal of territory in between ‘wilderness’ and ‘agricultural wasteland.’”

Many of the essays in this book call on environmentalists and farmers to embrace the idea that nature is more than a product. A product-based strategy for integrating farms and natural habitats might entail building wetlands and planting native prairie patches. That’s an important contribution, of course — but the agro-ecological restoration illustrated in these essays goes deeper than that by looking for ways to integrate farming practices with natural processes.

Not just flights of fancy.

Photo: USFWS.

For example, if nature is not just a product but a process — say, the way water and migratory birds move across a landscape — farmers can integrate those processes into their agricultural practices. That’s what South Dakota farmer Dennis Fagerland does every spring when he builds a series of culverts to create temporary wetland nesting habitat for ducks. The wetlands also decrease the flow of nitrates from his farm to a nearby lake. In “Stewards of the Wild,” Brian De Vore describes how the practice also has economic benefits: When Fagerland opens the floodgates in mid-June, he’s left with a rich stand of slough grass that produces triple the region’s average hay crop per acre.

Most often, nature is both product and practice, and farmers can sometimes successfully mimic both. For instance, if nature is charismatic megafauna and the natural disturbances created by their grazing patterns, cows can sometimes do the ecosystem work of buffalo and elk, as De Vore describes in “When Farmers Shut off the Machinery.” One farmer followed the standard recommendation to fence off a portion of a stream to keep his cattle from grazing on the bank. The results were unexpected: “The fenced-off area, now heavily forested, is host to a wide, shallow stream with erosion-prone banks. It’s almost impossible to wade through the sunless stretch because of the mucked up bottom. The trees have grown so well that they’ve shaded out the grasses and other undergrowth that hold soil together.” By contrast, “the section right above the fenced-off area, where [the farmer] retarded succession by allowing cattle to periodically graze, is a scene right out of a trout angler’s dream.” Under certain circumstances, controlled grazing of cows can mimic the effect of migrating herds of wild mammals, breaking down the angle of a sharp stream bank and creating a nutrient-rich environment where new plants can grow.

Wheat’s up?

Photo: USDA.

Although sustainable agricultural practices on individual farms are essential to environmental health, they can’t be effective in isolation, and the book also documents a half-dozen successful partnerships among government agencies, environmental groups, and private landowners to encourage eco-agriculture. For example, in “Reading the Land Together,” the executive director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation describes the Blufflands Project, which assists nearly 40 private landowners in conducting prescribed burns, controlling invasive species, and restoring prairies on more than 1,000 acres of former savannah in the lower Wisconsin River Valley.

One of the book’s most inspiring stories of farmers and environmentalists working together to “have their cake and nature, too” describes a partnership in the wheat-growing region of Minnesota’s Red River Valley. Farmers, conservationists, state and federal water and wildlife agencies, and municipal government agencies met with a mediator to create workable solutions to the problems caused by a decade of flooding in the valley. Cheryl Miller, who represents the National Audubon Society in the ongoing negotiation process, writes in “After the Deluge,” that the group consensus plan includes protecting farmers and restoring the natural characteristics and functions of the region’s rivers and lakes, restoring prairies and wetlands, and protecting native species. Miller concludes, “Environmentalists need to learn how to ‘get on the same side of the table’ as farmers and others struggling with a variety of environmental problems and cooperate in working through the social and institutional factors that drive environmental degradation.”

Environmentalists may not want or need to know as many specifics about agricultural management practices as this book provides. Yet the detailed stories are worthwhile, because they collectively illustrate one of the basic maxims of the environmental movement: Everything on Earth is interconnected. They also add up to a nuanced understanding that ecosystem processes (such as water management and nutrient cycling) can be as important as ecosystem products (such as native species). Perhaps most important, the stories of positive, complex, long-term interactions among farmers, environmental groups, and government are an excellent resource for thinking about how to develop new coalitions to better protect the environment. Environmentalists have already begun to “get on the same side of the table” with labor, the religious community, and some businesses. The Farm as Natural Habitat demonstrates that we must also build such coalitions with agriculture.

Several friends of mine, all of them environmentalists, have told me they picked up Small Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver’s most recent collection of essays, but speedily put it down because the book just didn’t pull them in. At first, I had the same reaction. And then I realized: small wonder. This book wasn’t written for environmentalists. Yet because of Kingsolver’s fame and her ability to talk about complex issues in a compelling way, Small Wonder may be more successful at communicating an environmental message to a lay audience than any other book published in recent years.

Small Wonder
By Barbara
Kingsolver HarperCollins,
224 pages, 2002

As a best-selling novelist whose Poisonwood Bible was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, Kingsolver has access to a broad, mainstream audience. In the past few weeks, at least five acquaintances have asked, “Have you read the new book by the woman who wrote The Poisonwood Bible?” These are busy people who wouldn’t cross the street for just any old essay on how the wasteful use of the world’s resources by the United States contributed to the events of Sept. 11 (“Saying Grace,” “Flying,” and “And Our Flag was Still There”), the scientific reasons to be cautious about genetic engineering (“A Fist in the Eye of God”), or the importance of biodiversity (“Seeing Scarlet”). But they were eager for a word — any word — from an incredible storyteller with a gift for prose so warm and solid it feels like a rounded river rock in your hand.

Given that many people, myself included, will read anything Kingsolver cares to write, we environmentalists should consider ourselves lucky that she cares to write about living well and justly on the earth. Throughout Small Wonders, Kingsolver uses her gift for storytelling and for strong, playful language to record the details of everyday life, while drawing out the connections and implications for the world at large — and particularly the post-Sept. 11 world.

Cock-a-doodle-do-good.

In “Lily’s Chickens,” for example, she tells the delightful story of her daughter’s relationship with a rooster: “My daughter is in love. She’s only five years old, but this is real. Her beau is shorter than she, by a wide margin, and she couldn’t care less. He has dark eyes, a loud voice, and a tendency to crow. He also has five girlfriends, but Lily doesn’t care about that either.”

The chickens are part of Kingsolver’s effort to grow most of her own food, an effort that she takes to heart without taking it too seriously: “I’m trying to learn about this complicated web as I go, and I’m in no position to judge anyone else’s personal habits, believe me. … Our quest is only to be thoughtful and simplify our needs, step by step.” Yet she doesn’t hesitate to use her gift for language to highlight injustice where she sees it. In talking about the energy and resource requirements needed to produce a pound of beef, she asks, “How can all this cost less than a dollar, and who is supposed to pay for the rest of it? If I were a cow, right there is where I’d go mad.”

Kingsolver shares what she loves about growing her own food — the poetic names of the heirloom vegetables, the satisfying ache in her muscles after a long day of gardening — while relating the practice of doing so to the events of Sept. 11 and to concern for the world in general: “There has never been a more important time to think about where our food comes from. We could make for ourselves a safer nation, overnight, simply by giving more support to our local food economies and learning ways of eating and living around a table that reflects the calendar.”

Because of Kingsolver’s fame and her ability to treat weighty issues with a light touch, Small Wonder will reach people environmentalists haven’t yet figured out how to connect with. The other week, an acquaintance told me, “I loved the essays about 9/11. I wish there had been more of those. But I was also really interested in the essays about her daughter’s chickens. It made me start thinking about where my own food comes from.” Thanks to Kingsolver, the two of us had a conversation about local food options in Iowa, our homestate, and I passed on some information about how to join a local community supported agriculture project.

True, this book wasn’t written for me. But I was drawn into it and appreciated it, nonetheless, for what it taught me about how to do my job better. As environmentalists, we should all tell stories to tell the truth. We shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. We should say more about what we love than about what we hate. And we should learn, like Kingsolver, to take heart from small wonders.

I am an environmental activist, and for almost a year, my husband and I have struggled to understand how our environmental commitments bear on our decision about whether to have children. So when I picked up Sandra Steingraber’s new book Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood,, I was immediately drawn in by the opening sentence: “Every woman who becomes pregnant brings to the experience her various identities.”

Having Faith
By Sandra Steingraber

Perseus books,
288 pages, 2001

In Having Faith, Steingraber weaves together her own identity as an ecologist and her experience of pregnancy and nursing with data from case studies, birth defect registries, and lab tests. The result is an absorbing book that bridges what Steingraber calls “the disconnect between what we know scientifically and what is presented to pregnant women seeking knowledge about prenatal life.”

Having Faith is a welcome addition to the small but growing body of environmental literature about parenting. Bill McKibben’s Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families explores the consequences for children and their families of an ecologically-based choice to have just one child. In Hunting for Hope: A Father’s Journey,, Scott Russell Sanders describes the future he would like to help create so that his 17-year-old son can face life with confidence and his newly married daughter can choose to have a child. Like the act of childbearing itself, these books embody deep faith in the future — in our ability to create a world worthy of our children.

Unlike either of those books, Having Faith is written by a woman — a salient difference, in this case, because it allows Steingraber to incorporate first-hand experience into her work. Because of her background in ecology, Steingraber went into her pregnancy asking the kinds of questions other mothers-to-be generally do not: “How do toxic chemicals cross the tough sponge of the placenta? How do they find their way into amniotic fluid? How do they enter the milk-making globes in the back of the breast? What are the effects for the child of these earliest encounters with synthetic chemicals?” These were exactly the questions that interested me as a prospective parent — and Steingraber’s answers filled me with both horror and hope.

The first nine chapters of Having Faith correspond to the months of pregnancy and examine the effects of environmental contamination at each stage. In these chapters, Steingraber repeats the tales that should have alerted us once and for all to the terrible damage that can be done to a fetus by outside agents — thalidomide, mercury, the synthetic hormone DES. She mines these stories for lessons: Fetuses are more susceptible to toxics than adults; some toxics may be “unsafe at any dosage”; the timing of the exposure may be more important than the amount.

In an ironic twist on the eco-feminist notion that the world is reflected in a woman’s womb, Steingraber notes that whatever is in the Earth’s water is in her uterus. Although only one study has ever been conducted on environmental contamination in amniotic fluid (and although that study was not very extensive), its results were alarming: Detectable levels of organochlorine compounds were found in one-third of the 30 samples tested. The amniotic fluid, which plays a key role in developing fetal immune systems, was also contaminated with immune-suppressing PCBs. DDT, known to interfere with sex hormone functioning, was found in concentrations equivalent to the fetus’s own sex hormones.

Toxic chemicals are also found in breast milk, and in the second part of the book, Steingraber shifts her focus from pregnancy to nursing. Based on both scientific data and her own experiences, she weighs the pros and cons of breast feeding versus bottle feeding. Steingraber points out that breast milk is the most contaminated food people consume during their lifetimes; hence it is babies, not adults, who receive the highest concentrations of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), chemicals which persist in the environment, bioaccumulate in fat, and are known to be toxic. Although she concludes that the benefits of breast milk still make it the best food for babies, she also explores evidence that contamination may be approaching levels at which the adverse effects of the chemicals outweigh the benefits.

We Shall Not Abstain

One evening as we took a walk, my husband asked me whether Having Faith was affecting my own thinking about the decision to have a child. I shared with him information I had just read that was particularly relevant to our situation: Steingraber’s discussion of studies that found increased risks of birth defects for babies born in agricultural areas, even if the parents did not work in agriculture. That’s us. One study Steingraber cites was conducted fewer than 200 miles from my home, at Lake Rathbun reservoir in south-central Iowa. The reservoir water, like much of Iowa’s surface water, contains high levels of the pesticide atrazine. Researchers found that those who drank water from the reservoir gave birth to babies with elevated rates of missing or abnormally shortened fingers, toes, arms, or legs, and malformations of the urinary and genital tracts, as well as congenital heart problems.

To baby or not to baby?

Photo: Clark Williams-Derry.

“There’s also a seasonal effect,” I told him. “That study documented an increased number of birth defects among babies conceived in agricultural areas in the spring, when pesticide use is highest. So if we’re going to do this, maybe we need to decide soon, or wait until summer.”

He was silent for a moment, then said, “I don’t think we can worry about everything.”

This is precisely Steingraber’s point — as individuals, we can’t worry about everything. Our culture encourages us to believe we can protect ourselves and our babies by what we avoid: by not drinking impure water, not eating fish, not living in Iowa, not conceiving in the spring. It’s a profoundly negative way of thinking, the antithesis of the advice a friend gave us regarding our decision of whether to have a baby: “You have to decide what you’re going to say ‘yes’ to.” Steingraber’s point is precisely that saying no, as individuals, will not protect us. Only a giant cultural “no” to producing these chemicals can permit us as individuals to say “yes” without fear.

And a cultural “no” can be very effective. Steingraber notes that levels of DDT in breast milk have been declining, and a new treaty to ban POPs should cause them to drop even further. She also suggests that mothers have enormous potential political power. In 1999, testifying at a negotiation round for the POPs treaty, Steingraber passed a bottle of her own contaminated breast milk around a spellbound gathering of high-powered politicians. She also envisions pregnant women marching on Washington, singing a new version of an old song, “We shall not abstain.”

As a culture, we can make decisions that protect children’s health. We have done it in the past, and we can do it again. This is the hope that suffuses the book: The “faith” in the title refers not only to Steingraber’s newborn daughter, but also to her vision for a healthier future.