Author: mariezhuikov
A Vision of Abundance
Alexandra Cousteau
Like many baby boomers, I could be found on Sunday evenings in the 1970s, cozied up to the television, watching a gnarly red-capped Frenchman exploring the depths of the ocean. The opening music to “The Underwater World of Jacques Cousteau” — full of violins and trumpets, with a playful xylophone riff — conveyed a sense of adventure and wonder that was unmatched by any other television show at the time.
The series inspired me to pursue a career as a marine biologist. Although that did not come to pass, I write about aquatic science, which is just about as good.
Like many young girls who watched the program, I had a crush on Cousteau’s son, Philippe. His other son, Jean-Michel, was okay, but Philippe – oooh la la! I was devastated when he died in an aircraft crash. And I thought Calypso crewman Falco had the coolest name.
Even as a poor college student, I donated money to the Cousteau Society and followed their adventures after the television show no longer aired.
So it was inevitable that I attended a talk last week by Philippe’s daughter, Alexandra. She was the keynote speaker at a celebration in Superior, Wisconsin, for the Lake Superior Research Institute.
The leggy blonde, whose mother was a model, is coming into her own as an icon for water issues. She founded a water organization, called Blue Legacy International, and was honored by the National Geographic Society as an Emerging Explorer.
Her talk centered on the theme of the importance of conservation and sustainable management of water for a healthy planet. However, Cousteau doesn’t like the word “sustainable.” She thinks that to most people, it means they must sacrifice something to achieve it, and that what is achieved is only marginal, not like things were before environmental problems happened.
The status of the oceans before humans started impacting it was one of abundance – huge schools of fish, giant pods of dolphins, a bay covered with oysters. Cousteau argued that we should have a vision of abundance instead of one of meager sustainability. It’s something people can be more enthused about and it’s an easier concept to imagine.
Given the realities of human abundance on the planet, this may be a pipe dream. But what a happy pipe dream!
Cousteau also thinks we focus too much on the environmental problems that exist and not on the vision we want to achieve. She gave the example of a tip from her downhill ski instructor, who told her not to look at the trees while she was skiing. “Because that’s where you’ll end up.” He advised her to focus instead on where she wanted to go.
Since I had just listened to a talk about sustainability by Andrew Revkin, I found Cousteau’s concept of abundance intriguing. I think those two should get together and compare notes, if they haven’t already!
I didn’t have my notebook with me, so am writing this all from memory. Two other things that struck me were her story about a child who was banned from watching the Cousteau TV show, and her story about how she learned scuba diving from her grandfather, Jacques.
Cousteau said that people usually gush about her grandfather’s television show (much like I did at the beginning of this post). But a man who attended one of her talks said he would get too excited by impending peril in the underwater adventures. When Cousteau would enter a cave filled with sharks, the boy would jump up and down on the couch, yelling at the divers not to go into the cave. He’d end up hyperventilating every episode until his parents took matters in hand and banned him from watching the show. Funny!
Cousteau said she learned how to swim before she could walk. At age seven, Jacques decided she was old enough to learn how to scuba dive (a technology he invented). As she sat on the edge of the boat, getting used to the regulator in her mouth and the gear on her body, she decided she didn’t like it. She was about to tell Jacques that she didn’t want to do it when he gave her a little push, and into the water she went. The undersea world has captivated her ever since.
Cousteau’s talk ended with a question and answer session. One of the last questions came from a tearful fifteen-year-old. She said that the students in her high school were all pessimistic and hopeless about the environment. She wanted to know how to offer them hope.
After taking a moment to compose herself, Cousteau, who was tearing up too, offered stories about things that are making the environment better. But perhaps, sensing the inadequacy of this in the light of teenage angst, offered to continue the conversation with the girl through her web site.
By now, most of the crowd was wiping away tears, including the director of the Lake Superior Research Institute, who closed the session in a choked voice.
Like her grandfather, this Cousteau has the ability to move people with her storytelling. I hope she inspires a whole ‘nother army of marine biologists and aquatic scientists. And a whole bunch of people who can tell the story of the environment, showing us where to go without crashing into the trees along the way.
Louis Jenkins’s Favorite Poem
Louis Jenkins reads at Zenith Book Store in Duluth, Minn.
Laconic prose poet Louis Jenkins gave a reading at a book store last week in Duluth. He’s one of my favorite local writers (even though he lives in a Minneapolis suburb now instead of Duluth), so I went. I think of him as Duluth’s Earnest Hemingway. He has that larger than life quality and talent. A chance encounter with him once even inspired a poem out of me. (See “Two Poets in the Cereal Aisle.”)
The Poetry Foundation website describes Jenkins’s poems as having “a tight focus on the mundane particularities of ordinary existence, using deliberately flat language to comic and often heartbreaking effect.”
The last time I went to one of his readings years ago, I left my cell phone on. My children were home with a babysitter, and I wanted to be available. I told the sitter only to call me in an emergency. Right when Jenkins was reading a poem, my phone went off. I was in the middle of the crowd and everyone looked at me. I was too mortified even to turn off the sound; I just fled the room with my ringer intermittently blaring.
The call was not an emergency. After mildly chastising the inexperienced babysitter (I am a Minnesotan, after all, we can’t afford to get all riled up), I sheepishly returned to the reading, waiting until the crowd was applauding to cover my entrance.
At last week’s event, you can bet I turned that sucka OFF. Jenkins read from his new book, “In the Sun, Out of the Wind.” Afterward, he took requests for readings from his other books and he answered questions.
One memorable question came from my friend and partner in crime, Sharon. She asked which poem of his was his favorite. His response was, “The next one.” He went on to explain: “Sometimes you think, ‘I got pretty close with that one,’ and those are the good ones. Other times you wonder, ‘Why in the heck did I write that?’ ”
Another person asked him what he thought of living in the Twin Cities. “Bloomington’s a lot like Duluth,” he said. “It’s only got one good restaurant.”
The topic of actor Mark Rylance came up. In case you haven’t seen the Tony awards lately, Rylance is the actor who, for the last two Tonys he’s won, recites a Louis Jenkins poem instead of giving an acceptance speech. Rylance and Jenkins even did a play together based on Jenkins’s book, “Nice Fish.”
Although age has taken its inexorable toll, Jenkins still has a twinkle in his eye when he reads, and his wit is unmistakably intact. I felt privileged to see him once again, and to sit through the entire reading this time.
8 Steps Toward Sustainability
Andrew Revkin, playing a right-handed guitar left-handed.
Former New York Times environmental reporter, Andrew Revkin, spoke in my neighborhood yesterday. I meandered over to hear him because he’s an acquaintance of mine and because I just think he’s cool. Little did I know he would offer ideas for making our world more sustainable, plus end his talk with a song!
His talk was part of a Peace & Justice series put on by the Alworth Center at the College of St. Scholastica. Currently the senior environmental reporter at the independent investigative newsroom ProPublica, Andy specializes in the topics of climate change, the Amazon rainforest, and sustainable development.
I met Andy years ago when I took part in a week-long science writing workshop put on by the New York Times in Santa Fe. He was my small group leader. He offered critiques on our stories and gained inspiration from us for new topics to cover for his beat.
One morning, he was reading a copy of the Times and railing at some edits made to his story. I recall being so tickled that even reporters at a venerable institution like the Times are at the mercy of their editors.
At the end of the week, we gathered for an outdoor barbeque and Andy strummed his guitar and sang for us. (He has accompanied the likes of Pete Seeger.) I added to the mix, singing the only song I have memorized, an old revolutionary war folksong called Katy Cruel.
Andy even offered to write me a letter of recommendation for my journalism grad school application, so he has a special place in my heart, and I couldn’t miss an opportunity to hear him again.
Many people don’t know that when Andy started his career, he wanted to be a marine biologist. I can’t recall the specifics, but he was working on a project about “Man and the Sea,” in a far-flung location like New Zealand, when he got distracted by an offer to crew a sailboat that was sailing the world. He joined the crew and spent a year-and-a-half at sea, broadening his literal and figurative horizons.
He explained all this during his talk (called “Ending Life as we Knew it”), and showed a photo that he took during his sailing travels of a modest shop in a small town that had piles of leopard skins stacked outside it for sale. This got him thinking about the sustainability of our species on the planet. In hopes of changing peoples’ attitudes toward the world in which they (we) live, he turned to journalism and started covering environmental issues.
Andy refers to climate change and sustainability as “super wicked” problems that will only be solved with multi-pronged approaches, including on the most difficult battlefield, which is inside peoples’ minds.
He offered eight strategies as a recipe for society to become more sustainable:
- BEND. This deals with resilience. We need to learn how to live on the land in a way that takes current and future landscape changes in to account. Andy offered an example of an ocean island that is all built out. If the island had some undeveloped land around its edges, it would be less vulnerable and more adaptable to sea level changes.
- STRETCH. We need to stretch our brains to think differently about things like land use planning and to think ahead to what conditions might be like in the future.
- REACH. This deals with communication. We need to let people know what’s happening with their world in a way that reaches them. I thought Andy’s talk was a good example of this. He didn’t just present a bunch of facts/figures and scary graphs. He told his story and got the audience’s emotions involved.
- TEACH our children and ourselves more sustainable ways of living.
- REVEAL. This involves calling attention to hidden problems. Andy used the example of heat or gasses being emitted from a factory, which could only be seen with a special camera. This example reminded me of the underwater camera that was pointed at the BP oil spill gushing out of the pipe in the Gulf of Mexico. Things like that get people’s attention and lead to quicker action.
- REFLECT. Get scientists together to cooperate on problems and give them time to reflect on solutions.
- REJOICE. Relish the gift of life and our humanness.
- REPEAT. Keep doing all these things over and over in a disciplined manner (like “lather, rinse, repeat”). Keep retesting systems and examining conventional ways of thought.
Andy said when he asked a prominent scientist what it would take to solve the issue of mankind’s sustainability, he was surprised when the man didn’t offer a lot of numbers and charts. Instead, the man said that sustainability will take “a miracle of love and unselfishness to solve” if we are to survive as a species.
Andy ended his speech by grabbing his guitar and singing a tongue-in-cheek song about how “liberating carbon” is the American way.
Let’s stop liberating that carbon people, and let’s keep thinking about how our actions affect the planet. And maybe, just maybe, things will get better.
Hemingway’s Cats
A descendant of Hemingway’s polydactyl (many-toed) cats sits sleepily in a box on the front porch. My son took this photo.
I read in the New York Times recently that the multi-toed descendants of Ernest Hemingway’s cats at his house in Key West, Florida, all survived Hurricane Irma. The house fared well, too.
Hemingway’s home in Key West, Florida.
My youngest son and I visited Hemingway’s house about five years ago. We delighted in seeing the cats, which lounged around in the yard and in the house. One was even sleeping on Hemingway’s bed, below a painting on the wall that depicted the house surrounded by cats.
I am glad to hear that everything is okay there.
Hemingway’s writing studio above the pool house.
Thinking of St. Martin Island . . .
Children in a Carnival Parade on St. Martin Island, 2012.
According to the New York Times, 95% of buildings on St. Martin Island have been damaged by Hurricane Irma. This is such a tragedy, I can’t even begin to imagine it. The island is such a magical place. Please see my post about my trip there five years ago.
My thoughts are with the tourists and residents there, and on all the other islands affected by the storm.
How Donald Trump Cost me a Boyfriend
It’s been almost a year, so I figure it’s safe to write about this dating mishap. I had tentatively dipped my toe into online dating after a long absence and some unsatisfactory experiences. One of my first dates was a local man who was a few years my junior. We met for lunch at a popular restaurant and had a good time.
We kept in touch and made plans to meet a few days later at an evening work event I was hosting. Then we’d go out for drinks afterwards. The event was on November 9, 2016, the day after the presidential election.
During the day, I had a lot going on at the office. My date emailed me a few times, saying his grandson ended up needing unexpected surgery in another city, and his daughter wanted him to go along with her for support. He wasn’t sure he would be able to make it back in time for our date.
I knew he had a grandson, but he never mentioned he was ill. I was understanding and told him not to worry about trying to make it back in time. I wished him and his grandson the best.
He replied that he’d let me know his logistics as the day progressed. After a few more brief exchanges, he emailed me, saying that he wouldn’t be able to make our date because the surgery took longer than expected. Again, I sent my good wishes and said I hoped we could get together some other time.
That evening, after the event, a group of us wanted to go out and have a post-election debriefing/support session. None of us were Trump supporters, and like much of the nation, we were in shock at his election. I got home from that late and depressed, with no energy to turn on my computer and check for messages from my wayward man friend.
The next morning, I dragged myself into work and checked my email. It contained a nasty note from my date. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something snarky about my lack of communication skills and that he no longer wanted to date me.
It was bad enough having a president elected that I didn’t like, but now I was getting dumped, too!
Both things caught me off guard. Not to mention the irony that I am a professional communicator who was getting dumped for my lack of communication skills. 🙂
Although I had doubts about the veracity of his claim of a sick grandson, I gave the man the benefit of those doubts and, after taking time to collect my thoughts and rein in my feelings, apologized to him for not “being there” when he needed someone during a stressful time, and I explained my situation.
But I also thought it was a rather knee-jerk and severe punishment to break up with someone you just met because they weren’t attached to their email at all times. So I told him I would no longer be contacting him, either.
Despite all this, the person I’d really rather blame the whole thing on is Donald Trump. If he hadn’t been elected, I wouldn’t have needed a group therapy session, and thus might have had more time and energy to be attentive to my date.
So you can add my love life to the list of things the president has dismantled since his election.
Polar Opposites: A Review of Two Frigid Books
Ashley Shelby by Erica Hanna.
By chance, I read two books about cold climates back-to-back. In some ways they are opposites, but in more ways they are similar, and both are good reads.
The reason why I am spending the fleeting Minnesota summer reading books about cold places is something you’ll have to ask my psychologist (if I had one). Maybe it’s just that it’s “safer” to read cold books during a warm summer. I certainly wouldn’t want to read them during the winter. It’s cold enough here then! That’s the best reason I’ve got for you.
The books are “Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube” by Blair Braverman and “South Pole Station” by Ashley Shelby.
Ways the books are opposite: Braverman’s book is nonfiction – a memoir set in northern climes like Norway and Alaska. Shelby’s book is fiction and is set in Antarctica. So we have opposite genres and opposite geography.
Ways the book are similar: They are both written by Midwestern women. Braverman now lives in Wisconsin and Shelby lives in Minnesota. They’re also both about women who have put themselves into challenging situations, socially and physically.
Braverman, a California native, traveled to Norway as a high school exchange student, and later as a folk school student, and still later as a museum curator of sorts in an isolated town there. She also lived on a glacier in Alaska, offering dogsled rides as part of a tourist business.
She chose Norway in high school to pursue her love of cold places, but had a bad experience (well, several bad experiences) with her host family father that made her fear men and question her own mettle. To prove her mettle, she later enrolled in the folk school to learn how to train sled dogs and survive outdoors in the North.
She writes, “What I feared most was men, and what I feared for was my body, and yet my body wanted men, and there was no answer for any of it. No, that wasn’t right. There was an answer for some of it. And that answer, I felt certain, was somewhere in the north, if I would only go and find it.”
The folk school is a community unto itself where she must prove herself and earn the respect of her teachers and fellow students. She learns her crafts well enough to later on get the job in Alaska, which is another isolated community encapsulated by and encamped on a glacier. This is where the book gets its title – the workers refer to the glacier as the “ice cube” and newbies are welcomed to the hard and challenging life on the “goddamn ice cube.”
(As an aside, this reminds me of when I used to work on Isle Royale National Park, which is located on an island in the middle of Lake Superior. We referred to it as “The Rock.”)
It’s here she has her first relationship with a man, but when things start to get difficult between them, he retaliates emotionally and physically, and makes her living situation in the camp very uncomfortable.
Eventually, Braverman makes her way back to Norway again and helps out the keeper of a general store and local historical museum. Much of the book centers around conversations of the shop regulars, who gather for coffee. Even here, Braverman is isolated and feels she must prove her usefulness to the locals.
“South Pole Station” centers on the story of Cooper Gosling, an artist who earns a fellowship to spend time and paint at the South Pole. Like Braverman, Gosling and most of the other characters in “South Pole Station” put themselves in the situation because, as one character aptly states, “We’re all here because of some shit.”
They are fighting personal battles along with elemental battles. Gosling’s battle is with the suicide of her brother. When they were young, they both used to love reading about polar explorers and made up imaginary games centered around their exploits.
Gosling’s battle almost costs her her life when she walks out into the elements in a drunken stupor. But in the end, the polies all gather around her and help her pay homage to her brother at the bottom of the world in a most fitting way.
The author does a great job describing the various social cliques that develop at the South Pole. You have the beakers, who are the scientists, and the nailheads who are the maintenance crew, etc. Like Braverman in her situations, Gosling must earn her place in the social system and in the hearts of the other polies in order to survive.
The books are both interesting reads. I gave them 4 out of 5 stars on Goodreads. And although they are set at opposite ends of the world their major themes are eerily alike.
Okay, so I’m Being Lame
I think it’s lame when bloggers write about how they don’t have anything to write about. Or they start off a story by apologizing for not writing in a while. Seriously, I don’t think anyone notices they’ve been gone (well, maybe their stalkers notice – grin).
I believe bloggers should just write a story when they have an idea and get on with it. Stop apologizing first!
But here I am saying that I haven’t written in a while and that I don’t really have much to write about. I do have an idea for a book review, but I haven’t finished the book yet. So, I’m in a holding pattern of sorts. Maybe I’m gathering strength for the next four years of blogging?
Anyway, I’m still alive, still out here. Just living life, enjoying the last of a fleeting summer, and waiting for my meandering thoughts and feelings to gel into something worthy.
Marie's Meanderings 