News from a Changing Planet -- #23
Recently, I read a book that has subtly but irreversibly (maybe? I hope!) changed the way I think about everything I thought I knew.
Before I get to that, I also wrote an essay for The Atlantic about reading children’s books in the age of extinction, which was published today, and I hope you will check it out! I’m also including a list of book recommendations…scroll down to find them!
[“Will Climate Change Make Real Animals Into Fairy Tales?”]
But back to the book…It’s called Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement by James Vincent. Stretching from about 30,000 years ago to the present, Vincent explores the arbitrary systems of measurement that shape the way we organize the world and are the foundations of how we think we know what we know. Rarely, if ever, have I realized or remembered that the units I think of as fixed (the degree, the hour, the kilogram) were arrived at randomly, a product of common knowledge or a limit settled upon for a perceived scientific or natural reason that could have been settled elsewhere.
The International Prototype of the Kilogram, or Le Grand K. Credit: National Institute of Standards and Technology
One of the most interesting categories of measurement explored in the book is the historical measurement of land. In pre-industrial times, units of land measurement often contained an idea of the work needed to make them productive, or how much life they were capable of sustaining. Less fertile soil was measured in smaller units; an area’s measurement combined labor and time. Germans had the Tagwerk (day’s work); the French had the journal for grain fields and the ouvrée for vineyards, which was much smaller, reflecting the slower, more intensive labor associated with picking grapes. The unit of measurement contained information that was relevant to how people
lived their lives, and what they needed to know. It was less useful, though, to administrators, so over time this changed and measurements of land became more regular, a process of surveying and standardization.
In the United States, this evolved into the Northwest Ordinances, the surveying and measurement process devised by Thomas Jefferson, which divided much of the U.S. up into 6-mile by 6-mile squares, abstracting the wetlands and sloping plains of the Midwest into a divisible network of right angles. Land thusly organized could be more easily managed, so while this new grid became the scaffolding “on which the American polity would grow, with the right to own land a defining characteristic of this new people,” the limits it imposed were also instrumental in the dispossession of Native peoples, Vincent writes. “As soon as indigenous people agreed to certain boundaries, they could be persecuted for broaching them.” The surveying allowed limits to be set, and land to be owned, interrupting the land management strategies and lifeways of the people and plants and animals that already lived here. In part, it ushered in an era in which land is conceived of as a resource to be taken for private use without thinking of the broader consequences.
Map of the Ohio Company of Associates' purchase of land in the Ohio River valley (c. 1787), made possible by the Northwest Ordinances of 1784, 1785, and 1787. Credit: The Ohio History Connection
In general, this book has gotten me thinking a lot about how we measure and how we decide what to measure, and how that reflects what we care about, and how it necessarily leaves some things out while measuring others. “To measure something, after all, is to impose limits on the world: to say this far by no further…” In particular, it made me think about how to measure or quantify the benefits of “natural solutions” to climate change, or efforts to protect biodiversity or certain endangered species. We don't yet know all the benefits yet to actions like these, or the benefits aren't measurable with our tools, because they privilege certain kinds of information over others. We know how to measure emissions reductions, but emissions avoided is harder; we can count the number of pollutants in a body of water and estimate their costs – health care costs or premature deaths to those exposed – but is it possible to put a number on the quality of life that comes from living near a clean river, and seeing an ecosystem thrive? How do we measure the quality of life of the plants and animals and other species that share the planet with us?
I also learned that for most of recorded history, the hour has had no fixed length. Some cultures divided the day into 10 hours; the schedule of Mass used to be the hands of the clock; the length of an hour often varied by season, lengthening in the summer and shortening in the winter. Mostly, now, the rhythms of the stars and the sun have been bound by mechanics, but shrinking and growing amounts of daylight and the rough calendar of seasons is “a reminder that the world doesn’t always run on human time.”
This is a medieval mass dial! From TW Cole’s Origin and Use of Church Scratch-dials, 1935, courtesy of buildingconservation.com
To that end, while a year ending in December and a new one beginning in January is arbitrary, I thought I would share some of the climate/environment/science books that I have read over the last year(s) that have meant a lot to me in case you are looking for things to read in 2023. Please send me your recommendations as well!
And also, negotiators reached a historic agreement on biodiversity at COP15. Read more here.
Fathoms: The World in a Whale by Rebecca Giggs
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Grid by Gretchen Bakke
Amity and Prosperity by Eliza Griswold
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane
In Search of the Canary Tree: The Story of A Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World by Lauren Oakes
Beloved Beasts by Michelle Nijhuis
Rambunctious Garden by Emma Marris
The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson
A Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson
Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert
Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn
Waterlog by Roger Deakin
Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller
Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
Second Nature by Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
Oak Flat by Lauren Redniss
The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen
A World on the Wing by Scott Weidensaul
Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit
The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson
Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us by Ruth Kassinger
Mosquito Empires by James R. McNeil
Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert
The Mortal Sea by W. Jeffrey Bolster
How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr
And not a book but ...the illustrations and writing of Perrin Ireland, whose newsletter, Thirsty Science, you can subscribe to at that link.
Happy New Year!
Tatiana