American Earth

American Earth, a thousand-page volume published last year by Library of America, is edited by Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature. McKibben obviously took a lot of care with this book, and the result is quirky, intriguing, and often upsetting. I don’t recommend reading it straight through: I took it in three sections myself, beginning in December.

American Earth is subtitled Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, and McKibben in his introduction draws a distinction between nature writing and environmental writing, which examines the interaction of man and his planet, and which in this country began with Thoreau. For this reason, he finds room for documents that are significant but not necessarily sparkling, like Gifford Pinchot on natural resources, Benton MacKaye on the urban versus the rural, and William Cronon on the environmental impact of the native American.

That still leaves many pages for some exceptionally powerful writing. For me, some of the standout selections include Edward Abbey on national parks, Berton Roueché on the killing smog of Donora, Pennsylvania, Barry Lopez on beached whales in California, John McPhee and Eliot Porter on Glen Canyon, and David Quammen on the coming mass extinctions, a piece that may require you to lie down for a while with a damp cloth over your eyes. Along with familiar 19th century literary figures such as John Muir, McKibben also includes generous selections of fine but neglected writers such as John Burroughs.

Inevitably, even a thousand-page book doesn’t find room for everyone. For me, the most notable omissions were Bill Bryson on the Appalachian Trail, Tim Cahill on wilderness misadventures, Majora Carter on the Bronx River, Gretel Ehrlich on the West, Robert Finch (a great name for a nature writer) on Cape Cod, Bernd Heinrich on ravens (he was born in Germany but is surely an American writer by now), Jon Krakauer on Alaska, Peter Matthiessen on (perhaps) the fishermen of Long Island, and especially Edward Hoagland. I would like to have seen something from one of the three great essay collections Hoagland published between 1971 and 1976: The Courage of Turtles, Walking the Dead Diamond River, and Red Wolves and Black Bears. (Hoagland, by the way, will soon be publishing Early in the Season, based on his journal of a 1968 journey to British Columbia.)

Jenn’s first publication

Jenn’s first published article appears today (on her birthday!), at the online magazine Strange Horizons. It’s an interview with Sheree Thomas, editor of the sci-fi anthology Dark Matter. Sheree was one of the first people Jenn and I invited to appear at our bookstore. She came with several of the authors in the book, and it was a great event.

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Note: My second post has appeared at Words Without Borders, and my first received a nice mention from Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading.

In the famous phrase by Isaiah Berlin that Nassim Nicholas Taleb quotes in The Black Swan, the fox knows many things while the hedgehog knows one big thing. If Malcolm Gladwell is the hedgehog in the world of Big Idea books, then Taleb is the fox. In his elegant short books, Gladwell takes one idea—the tipping point, the blink-of-an-eye decision—and makes it seem as if it neatly explains everything. (We are currently seeing a Gladwell backlash, with critics taking him to task for oversimplifying and overexplaining.)

Taleb, on the other hand, has his own big ideas, but rather than focusing them he links and radiates in many different directions. The result is a book that is much longer, messier, and quirkier than one of Gladwell’s, but that is likely to set off connections of ideas like strings of firecrackers in the reader’s mind.

A Black Swan, as it’s defined here, is “a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less than random, and more predictable, than it was.” Like George Soros, Taleb believes in “radical fallibility” (Soros’ term)—the idea that in investing, as in life, we know a lot less than we think we do. Like Soros, he aspires to being a philosopher. But whereas uncertainty brings out the humility in Soros, it brings out the combativeness in Taleb.

Taleb, an expert in chance and probability, is annoyed when people compare his field of study to gambling. Gambling is in fact much more predictable than the rest of life, and casinos generally do a good job of protecting themselves against lucky patrons. As an illustration, he lists the major losses of one big casino. All of them were caused by unpredictable Black Swans, including the loss of $100 million when a trained tiger mauled Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy.

In a similar way, we are seeing now that stock markets and economies can be devastated by risks that are completely unaccounted for by “sigma, variance, standard deviation, correlation, R square, and the eponymous Sharpe ratio.” These numbers, and the Modern Portfolio Theory that they underlie, are not just useless in Taleb’s view. They are worse than useless, because they create the illusion that we understand the risks we face.

As for the strings of firecrackers: When Taleb says that histories and societies “go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between,” I thought of Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, which holds that evolution works in the same way: long periods of stasis punctuated by short periods of rapid change. Taleb discusses the value of cognitive diversity, the idea developed at length by James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds that solutions are best found when many people approach a problem from independent points of view (not typical in the financial world). He also takes up the findings of Dan Gilbert and other researchers on the concept of happiness, who have found that neither our successes nor our setbacks have as much effect on our happiness as we predict they will. And he agrees with Seth Godin and others that success breeds success, an idea known as cumulative advantage. 

A different drummer

Thoreau’s Journal is in some ways a vastly expanded version of Walden, where precursors and variations on the language and themes of Walden appear in different but strangely familiar forms. In some cases, I think, the original version in the Journal is clearer, more personal, and more moving than the final published text.

Here, for example, is the entry from July 19, 1851:

Here I am thirty-four years old, and yet my life is almost wholly unexpanded. How much is in the germ! There is such an interval between my ideal and the actual in many instances that I may say I am unborn. There is the instinct for society, but no society. Life is not long enough for one success. Within another thirty-four years that miracle can hardly take place. Methinks my seasons revolve more slowly than those of nature; I am differently timed. I am contented. This rapid revolution of nature, even of nature in me, why should it hurry me? Let a man step to the music which he hears, however measured. Is it important that I should mature as soon as an apple tree? aye, as soon as an oak? May not my life in nature, in proportion as it is supernatural, be only the spring and infantile portion of my spirit’s life? Shall I turn spring to summer? May I not sacrifice a hasty and petty completeness here to entireness there? If my curve is large, why bend it to a smaller circle? My spirit’s unfolding observes not the pace of nature. The society which I was made for is not here. Shall I, then, substitute for the anticipation of that this poor reality? I would [rather] have the unmixed expectation of that than this reality. If life is a waiting, so be it. I will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. What were any reality which I can substitute? Shall I with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over myself, though when it is done I shall be sure to gaze still on the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not, — that still distant sky o’er-arching that blue expressive eye of heaven? I am enamored of the blue-eyed arch of heaven.

And here is the crystallized form of that thought, as it appears in the Conclusion of Walden:

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not?

The different drummer, perhaps the most famous image in all of Thoreau’s work, appears in the Walden text but not in the Journal. Some of the wordiness of the original has been trimmed away. But in other ways, the revision feels like a diminishment. It loses the touching self-doubt of a young man looking back on his first 34 years. It is compressed so strictly that the meaning of the “heaven of blue glass” becomes unclear. And the revision lacks the fine Thoreauvian sentence “If my curve is large, why bend it to a smaller circle?”

Library of America sale

Even at their regular prices, the books in the Library of America series have always been a bargain: beautifully edited editions of classic writers, printed in compact volumes on acid-free paper, and often containing more than 1,000 pages of text. But with an overstock sale going on, many of them look impossible to pass up. (Paul Bowles and American Sea Writing are the ones that grab my attention the most. The Paul Bowles volume includes not only stories but the marvelously titled travel book Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue.)