Ground Truth: A Guide to Tracking Climate Change at Home - Softcover

Hineline, Mark L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022634813X ISBN 13: 9780226348131

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Before you read this book, you have homework to do. Grab a notebook, go outside, and find a nearby patch of nature. What do you see, hear, feel, and smell? Are there bugs, birds, squirrels, deer, lizards, frogs, or fish, and what are they doing? What plants are in the vicinity, and in what ways are they growing? What shape are the rocks, what texture is the dirt, and what color are the bodies of water? Does the air feel hot or cold, wet or dry, windy or still? Everything you notice, write it all down.

We know that the Earth’s climate is changing, and that the magnitude of this change is colossal. At the same time, the world outside is still a natural world, and one we can experience on a granular level every day. Ground Truth is a guide to living in this condition of changing nature, to paying attention instead of turning away, and to gathering facts from which a fuller understanding of the natural world can emerge over time.

Featuring detailed guidance for keeping records of the plants, invertebrates, amphibians, birds, and mammals in your neighborhood, this book also ponders the value of everyday observations, probes the connections between seasons and climate change, and traces the history of phenology—the study and timing of natural events—and the uses to which it can be put. An expansive yet accessible book, Ground Truth invites readers to help lay the groundwork for a better understanding of the nature of change itself.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark L. Hineline is instructor in history, philosophy, and sociology of science at Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University.
 

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Ground Truth

A Guide to Tracking Climate Change at Home

By Mark L. Hineline

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2018 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-34813-1

Contents

Preface, 
PART ONE, 
Prologue, 
1 Intimate and Momentous, 
2 Seasons and Circulations, 
3 Lilacs and Passing Time, 
4 Noting with a Climate Eye, 
5 Bedrock and Baselines, 
PART TWO, 
6 The Green World, 
7 Wriggles, Buzzes, and Calls, 
8 Feathers and Phenophases, 
9 Warm Blood and Live Birth, 
10 The Atmosphere at Home, 
PART THREE, 
11 Ground Truth, 
Acknowledgments, 
Further Reading, 
Index, 
Footnotes, 

CHAPTER 1

Intimate and Momentous

Welcome back. The place where you just took your walk? Let us call that your dooryard. Its dimensions are provisional. You can enlarge it or shrink it later, as you see fit.

It is here, in your dooryard, that climate is changing. Has been changing for quite some time. Will continue to change, almost certainly at faster rates.

Such a homely term, though, "dooryard." It is still in use today in some places to describe a patch of the outdoors where the business of human work and play, in and out of doors, transacts with the natural, the world over which we assume we have little control. Etymologically, the word traces to New England, generally, and Maine specifically. If you've read some Walt Whitman, the nineteenth-century poet who celebrated the United States as no other, you might recall that in his elegy to Abraham Lincoln, "When Last the Lilacs in the Dooryard Bloomed," the word is hyphenated. That's fine. Whitman was from away, a New Yorker. But: dooryard. In designating a kind of place, the specific meaning of the word draws a contradistinction to the front yard (a space meant to impress society) and the barnyard (a place for working with animals).

The dooryard is close in, a place for work but also for exchange. It's where the kitchen garden might be, full of herbs and simple greens, as well as a few varieties of posies. But it's also full of insects and is a favored place for cats or, if there are no cats, then other creatures that make their livings by living as near to human habitations as they can — mice, for example. Or voles.

I have had a dooryard or two, but before I describe them, let me showyou another. I've ventured there a couple of times, and I've encouraged students to go alone, or with a friend or two. I went with friends myself, and that was nice, but on my first visit, I went there alone, and that was ideal.

The space surrounding Henry David Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond in the years 1844–46 was all dooryard. There was no front yard, because although he had visitors at the cabin, Henry — let's call him Henry — was unostentatious and little concerned about what visitors should find when they arrived at his door. He briefly contemplated making them sit on pumpkins, but clearly thought better of it. There were chairs in the cabin, three chairs altogether. There was also no barnyard, since he kept no animals and there was no barn — just a woodshed, which is dooryard architecture.

A visitor today knows right where the cabin stood and just where Henry placed his door, thanks to some keen archaeological work undertaken decades ago. Obelisks and graceful chains mark the cabin's walls. Using a dose of imagination, you can walk around the cabin. Or you can go inside, turn around, and see very much what Henry saw when he opened his door and peered through his dooryard.

I almost wrote "past his dooryard," but that would have been wrong. For the two years that he lived at Walden Pond, the whole landscape was his dooryard — the trees, the slope leading down to the pond, the pond itself. It stopped at the railroad tracks. Where the Fitchburg train passed, that was another place.

I stood there one November day, alone, when the sky was overcast in low clouds and the calls of crows echoed through trees, which had recently shed their leaves. Being a historian, and an academic one at that, generally unsentimental of mind, I was surprised by the thoughts I had as I gazed out through the trees and across the pond. Here I was in this place, this hallowed place. Not far from here, no more than three or four miles away, a handful of men had the moxie to begin a war of independence. And they succeeded in winning their freedom and freedom for generations that followed.

Becoming and then being free, what did they do with their freedom? The answer was under my feet. Here, an irascible twenty-something decided to see what life, shed of entailments, might be. Later, he would report his findings to the world in Walden; or, Life in the Woods.

Walden began life as a book about freedom, but it wandered off into a description of the woods themselves, and of the lives that filled the woods, more than about Henry's life. While there, Henry began a lifetime habit of noticing and making notes about first appearances — the first appearances of flowers, of leaves, of birds.

From his attentiveness, Henry came to believe that November was a separate season, unlike any other. Just November. That was what I experienced in Henry's dooryard: freedom, and the season of November.

Or did I? Beginning in 2002, Richard B. Primack, a botanist at Boston University who had previously ventured to places like Borneo to collect field observations, turned his attention to Walden Pond and to Thoreau's records of plants and animals — mostly plants. Primack discovered that many of the plants in Thoreau's notes could no longer be found there. Just as important, other plants still growing in Concord flowered at different times from those that Henry observed. Primack concluded that Walden — Henry's dooryard — was warming.

Thoughts of Walden bring to mind my own dooryard, for I once had the luxury of a dooryard when I relocated to a very small town in Maine (where to call the town a "village" would seem an affectation). I was nearing the age that Henry had been when he built and moved into his cabin, and my move was perhaps proportionally equivalent to his. Concord is to Walden Pond as Boston is to rural Maine. I had been born in Portland twenty-five years earlier, and though I only recalled vacations there with family, I kept a romanticized vision of it in my head, aided at that time by the many letters and essays of E. B. White, whose book of correspondence had been published just the year before.

Whether close to the coast or inland, houses in Maine that date from the 1800s once supported subsistence agriculture, at least, if not full-blown agricultural output. The one I rented for my first year there was more the former than the latter, and it saw me through four full seasons. The house itself was what is known as a two-story colonial. It had an ell, with a large kitchen below and a bedroom above. Unlike many of the houses in town, the ell was the end of the line. There were no additional connected buildings. By tradition, many houses (both in town on a few acres or less, as this house was, and farther out on the blue highways and back roads) were connected: big house, little house, back house, barn. But even without a connecting back house (the little house was the ell), the property had a full set of yards — front, barn (for there was a barn), and dooryard.

I moved in at the height of winter, within a month of meeting the inspiration and model for this...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022634813X
• ISBN 13: 9780226348131
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland