Dogsleds and Elephants

On Saturday mornings I wake and walk a few minutes down the road to this little newsagent.

I buy a copy of what used to be known as The International Herald Tribune but is now called The New York Times International Edition.

The fact that they renamed the paper New York Times is sad. It erases all that nostalgic sense of fidelity with a Paris based U.S. paper having the illustrious title of Herald Tribune. As an American you once had a link to other Americans who had lived in Europe and who also knew the Tribune.

I buy the paper far less often than before. Whatever your politics, the editorial pages and headlines scream nothing but invective. These pages have become a sort of cross between the National Enquirer and the Soviet newspaper Pravda (which I read a few English translation copies of during college, out of fascination). The constant, incessant, unadulterated, semi-fanatic editorial negativity is as repellant as, say, listening to Namibian white farmers blaming everything bad in their lives on their black neighbors. Truly, I know about that having lived there and listened to them. I mean, ultimately, hearing the same complaints again and again about the same topic becomes boring.

Politics aside, there were a few good articles in a recent Saturday’s edition. One was an interview with Walter Isaacson, who wrote the biography of Steve Jobs (excellent book) and who wrote a book I am now reading—which is a biography of Leonardo Da Vinci. The second article was a book review about a collection of essays about writing, written by John McPhee.

In college in Boulder I bought John McPhee’s book titled Coming Into the Country when I lived on Pennsylvania Avenue on the Hill. And the book—which is non-fiction about people living in Alaska, told many stories. One included some woman who had moved to Alaska from the lower 48 states and went to a meeting of, I think, dog sled racers. She had decided she needed a husband. So she eyed these men at this meeting, pared the possibilities down to three, then selected one. And, damn if she didn’t marry him!

Reading this, I thought: How brutal! The gal just checked a box and snagged a clueless dude.

But, who knows? I mean, maybe it was a match made in heaven. Truly. I envy her pluck and determination, to be honest.

Anyway, back to McPhee.

One of the books he wrote is titled Encounters with The Archdruid. The archdruid being a very well known and controversial environmentalist leader of the 1970’s and 1980’s named David Brower. McPhee arranged for Brower to spend a few weeks rafting through the Grand Canyon, together with a man he frequently debated with vociferously in public–Floyd Dominy, the head of the Bureau of Reclamation and builder of dams who basically wanted to dam up the Grand Canyon. Author McPhee documented their interactions, which turned spicy.

After leaving college in Boulder and spending weeks in Steamboat Springs, I came back to Boulder one weekend for an environmental conference. The keynote speaker was David Brower. I recall him explaining as he stood at the microphone in Regents Hall, with passion, how miraculous our lives are, and how even the process of chewing and swallowing and digesting food was of marvelous complexity. He was a tall man and a huge figure and appeared to be warm and generous and wildly attuned to the need to preserve wilderness and nature. I think he was some sort of Berkeley Birkenstock sort of chap who got the Sierra Club’s non-profit status revoked after he, the then leader of the organization, published some political piece in a mainstream media paper.

I remember in college a lot of students wore t-shirts with color drawings of, say, wolves. Or mountain goats. They were popular at the time. Written above these drawings, in some dainty and rococo script, was some quote about how nature was fragile and gentle. I always thought that was a crock of shite to portray the natural world as gentle and fragile. Because nature is not fragile, or timid, or weak (think tsunami in Japan, hurricanes in Houston, wildfires in California). Even if we humans nuke ourselves into oblivion (I pray not), within months some species of life—say beatles or lice or cockroaches or maybe even some robust lemur—will begin adapting to the radiation and multiplying and eating our thermonuclear toasted carcasses as they find them strewn across city streets and throughout the spiral configurations of tract homes. Nature—tectonic churning and billions of years old, will merrily plod on. Asteroid collision? Ice age? Bring it on! Mama Earth could not care less. Truly.

But I do remember my own mother saying, once, “Imagine there were no elephants left in the world?”

At the time, even with all the poaching taking place in Africa decades ago, I thought that was kind of far-fetched.

No more. We’re currently losing elephants due to poaching at a rate of 8 percent per year.

Yet you don’t see that on mainstream media headlines.

What I’d prefer to read in newspapers is the marvel of the world we live in, and how aspects are challenged. Rather than reading some Anti-Trump invective or reviews of a book by Hillary, why don’t we learn more about the fate of elephants across the African plains, or the latest space exploration voyages or the growth of high speed trains (or semi-empty cities) across China? I think Americans would be better off if we began to think more internationally, to be more Herald Tribune rather than New York Times minded with respect to world.

It’s excellent to see that Isaacson, who wrote the biography of an American icon (Steve Job), then focused his attention on the biography of a European Renaissance icon (Da Vinci). Fantastic.

Are we in too much of a rush to wonder at what is going on in the world around us? Are we in such a hurry that a woman would need to identify her partner for life during a single dog sled meeting?

You get the point.

Too busy to tune into the world? I don’t buy that. Buy an atlas instead of a new Lexus. It will cost you less, won’t break down and requires no change of oil. You won’t even need to plug it in.

Books, such as those written by Isaacson and of McPhee can, vicariously, expand our awareness of the great world we live in.

So – Read.

Widely.

Not just headline stories in mainstream media.