The nature of our estrangement
By Paul Greenberg |
January 27, 2013, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THIS past summer I found myself traveling with a strange man straight out of Melanie Challenger's book "On Extinction." He was an Alaska homesteader, firefighter and fishing guide, and for a week he led me down a remote rivulet in Alaska's interior. The ostensible purpose was to fish the biggest remaining sockeye salmon run in the world.
But the more I tried to establish a narrative about this man, the more he broke up my effort with a kind of wilderness attention deficit disorder. No sooner had he hunched over to differentiate the identities of the shades of sage and white in the tundra than he would hear the call of a ptarmigan. This would lead to a discourse on bears in particularly snowy years. He was so profoundly knowledgeable, and everything felt incredibly nuanced and relevant. But at the same time his accounts were often tedious and circular, without any "point" an impatient New Yorker could discern.
Which brings me to Challenger's book.
"On Extinction" is a strange hybrid of travelogue and natural science, misted over with a wanderer's lonesome observations of a world in the process of disappearing. Challenger, a poet, acknowledges that she is something of a naif when it comes to nature and views the book as a transcendental sentimental education, an attempt to understand why so many things in nature "were imperiled and why that should matter." Working with the British Antarctic Survey and other far-flung institutions, Challenger makes three "peregrinations": to Cornwall, in England, the Antarctic and the Arctic.
She begins by isolating herself in a cabin in Cornwall and ruminating on her own illiteracy with regards to nature. Crossing a moor, she takes in the birdsong all around her that leaves her baffled. "I was bereft of speech for this landscape, suffering from a kind of amnesia shared with others of my generation," she writes. "What were the tiny birds that pinged out of the bracken...?"
Challenger, along with most of modern humanity, is losing or has already lost the vocabulary necessary to interact with her environment. She traces the origins of this amnesia back to our relentless quest to repurpose nature to our own ends.
In her trips, Challenger connects her own estrangement from nature. But too much of her writing is overwrought, and an uneasy question arises in the mind of the reader: Is something profound being conveyed here or is this an extended, citation-rich blurring of something inherently clear - ie, humans mess things up and it's sad and I wish we could do something to change all that?
Yet the big loops of this work intersect in interesting ways. I cannot say if it always works, but I can say that a strangeness is evoked, a strangeness that conveys how we walk the Earth in the 21st century as in a dream, the natural landscape dropping away into oblivion after our every footfall.
But the more I tried to establish a narrative about this man, the more he broke up my effort with a kind of wilderness attention deficit disorder. No sooner had he hunched over to differentiate the identities of the shades of sage and white in the tundra than he would hear the call of a ptarmigan. This would lead to a discourse on bears in particularly snowy years. He was so profoundly knowledgeable, and everything felt incredibly nuanced and relevant. But at the same time his accounts were often tedious and circular, without any "point" an impatient New Yorker could discern.
Which brings me to Challenger's book.
"On Extinction" is a strange hybrid of travelogue and natural science, misted over with a wanderer's lonesome observations of a world in the process of disappearing. Challenger, a poet, acknowledges that she is something of a naif when it comes to nature and views the book as a transcendental sentimental education, an attempt to understand why so many things in nature "were imperiled and why that should matter." Working with the British Antarctic Survey and other far-flung institutions, Challenger makes three "peregrinations": to Cornwall, in England, the Antarctic and the Arctic.
She begins by isolating herself in a cabin in Cornwall and ruminating on her own illiteracy with regards to nature. Crossing a moor, she takes in the birdsong all around her that leaves her baffled. "I was bereft of speech for this landscape, suffering from a kind of amnesia shared with others of my generation," she writes. "What were the tiny birds that pinged out of the bracken...?"
Challenger, along with most of modern humanity, is losing or has already lost the vocabulary necessary to interact with her environment. She traces the origins of this amnesia back to our relentless quest to repurpose nature to our own ends.
In her trips, Challenger connects her own estrangement from nature. But too much of her writing is overwrought, and an uneasy question arises in the mind of the reader: Is something profound being conveyed here or is this an extended, citation-rich blurring of something inherently clear - ie, humans mess things up and it's sad and I wish we could do something to change all that?
Yet the big loops of this work intersect in interesting ways. I cannot say if it always works, but I can say that a strangeness is evoked, a strangeness that conveys how we walk the Earth in the 21st century as in a dream, the natural landscape dropping away into oblivion after our every footfall.
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