Thoreau’s renewable energy plan

I discovered this quote while rereading Men of Concord, which collects writings on friends and neighbors from Thoreau’s Journal, with illustrations by N.C. Wyeth. George Minott was the source of many of the best stories of hunting and the outdoors that Thoreau preserved in the Journal, and this account of Minott’s woodlot is a nice example of a sustainable energy strategy based on local resources.

December 11, 1856. Minott tells me that his and his sister’s wood-lot together contains about ten acres and has, with a very slight exception at one time, supplied all their fuel for thirty years, and he thinks would constantly continue to do so. They keep one fire all the time, and two some of the time, and burn about eight cords in a year. He knows his wood-lot and what grows in it as well as an ordinary farmer does his corn-field, for he has cut his own wood till within two or three years; knows the history of every stump on it and the age of every sapling; knows how many beech trees and black birches there are there, as another knows his pear or cherry trees. He complains that the choppers make a very long carf nowadays, doing most of the cutting on one side, to avoid changing hands so much. It is more economical, as well as more poetical, to have a wood-lot and cut and get out your own wood from year to year than to buy it at your door. Minott may say to his trees: ‘Submit to my axe. I cut your father on this very spot.’ How many sweet passages there must have been in his life there, chopping all alone in the short winter days! How many rabbits, partridges, foxes he saw! A rill runs through the lot, where he has quenched his thirst, and several times he has laid it bare. At last rheumatism has made him a prisoner, and he is compelled to let a stranger, a vandal, it may be, go into his lot with an axe. It is fit that he should be buried there.

Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich

I’ve had my copy of Ravens in Winter almost since it was published in 1989, and have only now got around to reading it. It always seemed mildly interesting, but not enough to move me to pick it up. I kept it around partly partly because of the handsome jacket—but after all, did I really want to read an entire book about ravens? And especially ravens in the winter? Once in a while, when I leafed through the book, it seemed to consist of descriptions of waiting around in the cold for ravens to feed at the slaughterhouse scraps and roadkill animals that the author had left out for them.

That proved to be an accurate impression. What’s more, Ravens in Winter is devoted to solving a single puzzle: why it is that ravens appear to share their food with others (at least some of the time) and even to call other ravens to the feast.

But as it turns out, Heinrich’s fascination with the ravens and with this puzzle is infectious. In writing that is evocative without being flashy, he conveys the pleasure of earning his observations and discoveries with the hard work of lugging hundred-pound sacks of meat or rising before dawn in a drafty cabin to climb a tree and wait for the first birds to arrive. 

January 5. It is near zero and snowing hard again this morning, but I’m as close to heaven as I think I’m ever going to get. The balsam fir branches are bent with glistening powdery snow. All sounds are muffled, except for those of forty or so ravens. The yelling and bickering in accompaniment to the constant rhythm of the pounding of their bills on the solidly frozen meat is music to my ears. The only “window” from my cabin this morning is through the 135-millimeter lens of my 35-millimeter camera. The sheep carcass thirty feet from the cabin is almost full frame, and on and surrounding it are the ravens.

I see the snowflakes on their glistening black backs. It is a beautiful sight. I am finally close to them, which until now had not seemed possible. The birds are totally at ease. After feeding, some roll on their backs in the snow like happy dogs or lie breast down, fluttering and kicking snow. Some slide on their breasts, pushing themselves forward with their legs. They are snow bathing, something I’ve seen no other bird do. It looks like young kids romping in the snow, and I’m sure they do it for the fun of it.

Jupiter and the Milky Way

The Astronomy Picture of the Day is often stunning, but today’s is even more beautiful than usual: a view of Jupiter and the Milky Way from a mountain road in Turkey. It’s worth clicking on the image to see an even bigger version.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

The Jungle seems to be one of those books that is often referred to but rarely read. I knew that it contained graphic descriptions of filthy and unsafe working conditions in the meat industry of the early 20th century, but it somehow escaped me that this was a novel and not a journalistic exposé.

One of my colleagues recently read The Jungle as well as Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (the basis of the Daniel Day-Lewis film There Will Be Blood) and spoke highly of them. The Jungle turns out to be not only a well-researched look into the horrors of the Chicago stockyards but a grim, relentless, and well-told story of immigrants ground down by an unregulated and unscrupulous business monopoly.

The book does have some memorable descriptions of how cattle and pigs are converted into meat. Not surprisingly, one of the worst concerns the making of sausage (p. 134 of the Bantam edition):

There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white — it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat when he saw one — there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.

What struck me just as much, however, were the scenes describing how the hero, a Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis, and his family are victimized by a century-old version of deceptive mortgage lending. Hoping to avoid the trap of endless rent, Jurgis buys what he is told is a brand-new house for a down payment of three hundred dollars and a monthly payment of twelve dollars until the full price of fifteen hundred dollars has been paid.

It is only after the contract has been signed that he finds out about the charges for interest and insurance, and learns that the supposedly new house has been sold again and again to buyers who could not keep up with the payments and were put out on the street when they fell behind. Each time the house is simply repainted, and some superficial repairs made.

One of the most wrenching scenes in The Jungle comes when Jurgis is released after a month in jail and walks homes for miles across Chicago in bitter winter weather. At last he arrives at his own street:

Jurgis went closer yet, but keeping on the other side of the street. A sudden and horrible spasm of fear had come over him. His knees were shaking beneath him, and his mind was in a whirl. New paint on the house, and new weatherboards, where the old had begun to rot off, and the agent had got after them! New shingles over the hole in the roof, too, the hole that had for six months been the bane of his soul — he having no money to have it fixed and no time to fix it himself, and the rain leaking in, and overflowing the pots and pans he put to catch it, and flooding the attic and loosening the plaster. And now it was fixed! And the broken windowpane replaced! And curtains in the windows! New, white curtains, stiff and shiny!

Then suddenly the front door opened. Jurgis stood, his chest heaving as he struggled to catch his breath. A boy had come out, a stranger to him; a big, fat, rosy-cheeked youngster, such as had never been seen in his home before.

The Tapir’s Morning Bath by Elizabeth Royte

Two of my colleagues went to Costa Rica in August, and since I don’t have any interesting trips on the horizon myself, I think I probably picked up The Tapir’s Morning Bath out of rainforest envy.

The Tapir’s Morning Bath is about the scientists who live and work on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, studying spiny rats, fruit bats, spider monkeys, and other flora and fauna. Before I even began the first chapter, I had already learned something. I had imagined that the Panama Canal was a long concrete trench that stretched all the way across the isthmus, but a map of the Canal Zone shows that ships actually pass through the sizable Gatun Lake during a large part of their passage. Barro Colorado (meaning Red Mud) is the biggest island in the lake. It’s what remains of a ridge of land that was flooded after the damming of the Chagres River in 1910. The island is protected from hunting and development, and a laboratory (now run by the Smithsonian Institution) has been operating there since 1923.

Elizabeth Royte spends a year on the island, off and on, and attaches herself as a field assistant to several scientists. She not only gives a vivid sense of what it’s like to confront a wild peccary on a remote forest trail, or to disentangle a bat from a mist net, but lucidly explains the theories each scientist is setting out to prove. She regrets the passing of naturalists with a big-picture understanding of the interactions of plants and animals in favor of ever more specialized number crunchers, but she recognizes that once in a while even a seemingly useless bit of data completes a missing piece of the puzzle and even offers some practical benefit to medicine or science. And sometimes it just blows a hole in someone’s cherished theory.

Bret Weinstein studies bats that build shelters out of leaves, apparently to give them shelter near their feeding grounds so they don’t have to fly home every night. Bret has also noticed that a male bat keeps several mates in a sort of harem, going to considerable effort to maximize the chance that he can pass on his genes. When the author tells him another scientist has found that female bats often mate in the forest, regardless of what harem they belong to, “a look of consternation” crosses his face. The author thinks of an observation attributed to Mark Twain (though I haven’t been able to find the source): “Researchers have already cast much darkness on the subject, and if they continue their investigations we shall soon know nothing at all about it.”