Le Globale Warming est arrivé...

Mayday, Mayday, on May 1st, at Lowe's. This morning your Red Hook neighborhood home improvement superstore was laying out the largest stock of airconditioners I've ever seen. An unpleasant barometer of the warming times to come. I wanted to yell "too soon, too soon!"

Alabalmy

After enjoying the overwhelming hospitality of Atlanta for a long weekend of art openings and book reading, Laura and I hit the road. We were looking forward to a slow and relaxed three days of tropical camping along the sultry gulf shores, en route to New Orleans. Back-roading it, we headed for the Eufaula National Wildlife Refuge, on Alabama's easternmost edge. At a viewing platform overlooking distant flooded fields dotted with gabbling waterfowl, we gobbled sandwiches under the grey and wintry luncheon sky, noting the unseasonable chill in the air. Not to fear, we thought; there will be many more miles of driving south and sunward, before we pitch our tent in the balmy Caribbean breezes.

At Opp, just above the Florida panhandle, we sought out the Frank Jackson State Park campground. Signs warned of alligators, but not of the weather. After choosing a campsite, we drove back into town. Opp seems to have once stood for "opportunity," but perhaps the town lost the rest of its letters when it was discovered that, to be honest, there were few opportunities to be had there. The only supermarket was a squalid, discount affair clogged with cut rate corn syrup and nonperishable items made from refined flour. It was as dismal a shopping experience as capitalism has to offer. Settling for couple of packages of ramen, we drove back to Frank Jackson, discovering that with nightfall, and in our brief absence, the wind had begun to blow, hard, directly off of the lake and towards our campsite. The advertised alligators all seemed to be safely hibernating. Worse, had the wind not been churning the surface of the water into a series of choppy, standing waves, it was cold enough outside that the lake would certainly have frozen.

Much colder than it looks

Pulling on the skimpy windbreaker I had packed "just in case," I set to getting the tent up. Soon my fingers were as frigid and chilly as the cold aluminum tent poles. The wind was so violent that the stove would not even light, until Laura, freshly returned from a visit to the toilet block--"wonderfully heated, unlimited hot water, you really ought to try it sometime"--suggested putting it deep under the camper top of the pickup. Stomping our feet, we took our mugs of instant noodles back into the cab, where we had been sitting all day, driving and "looking forward to parking this thing and getting out into nature."

Outside, the wind was whipping the rainfly of the tent, and I watched it anxiously from inside the car, fearful that the whole mess might blow away. I had faith however, in my staking skills, learned in Antarctica while preparing to head out to camp at Mt. Boreas. After checking the stakes I gloated to Laura that the tent was as safe as a house. All plans for an evening stroll were abandoned, and with the temperatures in the twenties, and the wind chill doubtless far lower, we bundled into the tent and battened down the zippers.

Dawn arrived, crisp and calm and frigid. "I'll make tea, while you take a hot shower," I announced, magnanimously. I put water on to boil and began stuffing the sleeping bags in their stuff sacks and taking apart the tent. My toes are chilly, I thought. Perhaps I'll start the car, let it warm up for our departure. Maybe I'll just sit in it, for a moment.

Ice hockey, anyone?

When Laura returned to the half-dismantled tent she found me sitting in the truck clutching a cup of jasmine tea, the heater blasting. "What's all this nonsense about Antarctica you are always spouting?" She asked, when I rolled the window open a tiny crack. "You're nothing but a big wimp."

Coincidence, or inspiration?

Given that the Suddeutsche Zeitung ran my photo of the gasoline infrastructure being swallowed up by the jungle on Monday, and that only one blog post earlier I signaled Camilo José Vergara as an important photo-chronicler of collapsing American architectures, I'm wondering just where the New York Times came up with the brilliant idea to run some of Vergara's photos of defunct gas pumps on the op-ed page today, Friday, the 13th.

"I have often been amazed by the ways harsh and aggressive forms are taken over by the natural world," Vergara writes. Amen to that, and boy do we love scooping the Times.


Also in the NYT today, our nomination for humanitarian-of-the-year award goes to one Mr. Louie Brundidge, mentioned in the final graphs of a story about flood devastation in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where the Cedar River is as much as 17 feet over its banks and the entire city center is below the surface. A guy named Demenick Ankum "drove to his house on 19th Avenue to save anything he could. By the time he finished packing, his car was underwater. He had to pay a neighbor, Louie Brundidge, $10 to rescue him from the house in Mr. Brundidge's red aluminum boat."

How's that for your fabled midwestern hospitality? Thanks so much, Louie, you are a gentleman and a patriot, valiantly upholding the values our great nation is known for. We're sure your mother was proud to have you.

I knew this whole blogging thing was going to pay off eventually...

One of the many sharp-eyed antarcticiana-reading newspaper editors around the globe thought this image from our recent travels was too good to pass up, and slapped it on the front page of Monday's edition of one of Europe's major dailies. Well, at least one section of the paper, the uniquely European "feuilleton." What's more, instead of simply stealing it, they actually contacted me and purchased it, in cold hard euros, the new dominant world currency. If anyone has enough German to offer a translation of the photo caption in the "comments," it would be much appreciated. We're getting something about the ruins of an obsolete culture, but by the time we muddle our way down to what seems to be the mention of a Croatian engineer, we've pretty much lost the thread...

What are you doing here?

Looking off the back deck a couple of weeks ago, which is to say smack dab in the middle of January, I was shocked to spot cavorting in the neighbor's garden a spectacular male Baltimore Oriole. Brilliantly plumaged in orange and black, this bird is an occasional but never common springtime migrant through the grit of Red Hook. It is entirely unexpected in winter. Even the hardiest representatives of its clan should be found passing the season no further north than North Carolina. Global warming? Perhaps.

Unlikely winter visitor; in January it should be far to the south of Baltimore. (I know, my fence needs a little work; luckily spring will soon be upon us)

Then, this week's religious Friday telephone call to the New York Rare Bird alert, 212-979-3070, often transcribed on the web, brought exciting news of a putative first state record for Scott's Oriole, a yellower relative of the Baltimore. This particular individual is so confused we can scarcely blame climate change; it normally resides in the south-western deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. Having arrived somewhat addled in the New York area, its motives unknown, this bird, a first year male, apparently confused Union Square Park with the arid bluffs and canyonlands of its place of birth, taking up residence amongst the starlings, pigeons and restauranteurs.

That thing must be around here somewhere

Once having established that the famous Union Square Greenmarket does indeed operate on Fridays, so that we would be able to purchase organic vegetables and local grassfed beef between bouts of ornithology, therefore metaphorically killing two birds with one stone, we set off for the city in an adrenaline rush. As I've noted before in these pages, it has historically been the kiss of death whenever I go on one of these local rarity hunts, as my presence all but guarantees the permanent disappearance of the sought-after specie. But last August, that curse was lifted.

"What are all you people looking at?" was the most common question innocent passersby asked of the entranced cult of birders

At the southwestern corner of the park, already known, the scuttlebutt had it, as the preferred hangout for the oriole, clumps of binocular-toting birdos stood chatting, but without intensity. There was none of the unified, focussed pointing of high caliber optics that indicates, even from far off, that the bird has been spotted and is under observation. We abandoned this placid scene, delving into the denser foliage at the heart of the urban square, tripping over tourists and pushing old ladies out of the way. Still no bird.

The scene in front of Staples, Union Square, last Friday

We forged on, undeterred by the winos and businessmen braving the cold to slurp lunch-time soup on park benches. There, up ahead, half-way to the greenmarket where the organic turnips were waiting, about even with 16th st., stood another dense knot of birders. This time all had their binoculars clamped to their faces in an almost military synchrony. Necks cocked back as one, the group was staring skyward into a tree, eying a dismal, yellow feathered blob. Scott's Oriole! Or at least so they are saying. Hunched over amongst the backlit twigs at the top of a tall tree, it was impossible to say for sure. It was a yellow and black bird, that was certain.

Dude, I came all the way from Brooklyn, do you mind coming down out of that tree?

No wonder, perhaps, that this alien visitor, adrift in the great city, was almost ignored for more than a month. First seen in early December, it was misidentified for weeks as an Orchard Oriole, a regular summer visitor to the north-east. Although even less likely to be seen in New York in January than my Baltimore, the sighting of a winter Orchard Oriole was not so fabulously thrilling that this bird received sufficient attention for its true identity to be revealed. Perhaps it spent some time hidden in the confines of the elitest, private and key-protected Gramercy Park, just uptown, or perhaps those who visited it were happy to call it an Orchard and move on. In any event it was only last week that expert examination of photographs finally inspired a horde of birding visitors to visit Union Square.

One of the great things about life in New York is that the same guy who will walk by Madonna or George Clooney on the sidewalks of lower Broadway without batting an eye happily leaps into action as a kind of self-anointed tour guide to such obscure events as the appearance of a vagrant Oriole in a city park, marshaling foot traffic and giving the newcomers the latest updates. How else to account for a friendly binocularless man in an enormous orange parka, altogether unfamiliar with the unwritten etiquette of the bird-obsessed, simply swept away in the communal excitement, jumping up and down, gesturing to the crowd that he had found a superior vantage point? And the curious, who perhaps had never shown any interest in a bird before in all their city lives, amazed to see so many freakish and apparently unemployed citizens pointing their expensive optics at a bland dot in a tree, and therefore waiting around, chatting, learning about the weird ways of the bird folk and hoping like the rest of us that the bird would come lower in the trees to offer a view worth telling friends and family about later in the day: the story of meeting the birders incomplete without the punchline of getting a good look at the bird.

March of the zombies? Or the Scott's Oriole (2858), finally on the ground, offering crippling looks?

At last, following, it seemed, a swirl of Starlings, the Oriole took flight in the direction of its beloved southwest. Rushing back towards the intersection of University and 14th St., we arrived at the favored corner in time to find the bird pecking away at some mandarin segments thoughtfully left on the ground in a tiny fenced off corner of the park, just across the street from the Staples superstore. Perhaps not everyone's idea of a wilderness experience, but very satisfying all the same.

Note the dark face with almost black cheeks and the olive-streaked quality to the upper back, both important field marks. This bird was apparently first spotted in early December and was only conclusively identified this week. Superior images are here.

Forget organic, I'll take the shiny celery, please

It is only a matter of time before we will be awash in harebrained schemes to combat global warming. I fully expect by the end of the year to read somewhere that if we would all just leave our refrigerator doors open for minutes a day, all our problems would be solved. I'm not a scientist, but somehow I find this unconvincing.

There but for the grace of God go I...

The Alexey Maryshev, on board which I and the Generation Earth team sailed from Ushuaia, Argentina to the Antarctic Peninsula in March, has had a terrible accident, and the captain, a gangly, Ichabod Crane looking guy who chainsmoked and spoke only Russian, is in big trouble. He seemed to us a consummate professional and seasoned seaman, so the rush to judgement appears to me to be born out of a corporate desperation to assign blame first and figure out what happened later. Although there are special standards of responsibility for captains at sea, the fact that a glacier fell apart just as he was sailing underneath it seems to me to have much more to do with the grave state of the climate than it does to do with navigation. Here's hoping everyone will ultimately be okay....

Rwandan Textures

Rural Rwandan buildings are almost indistinguishable from the landscape in which they sit; in most cases the earth used to construct them is drawn from a hole only a few feet from the house, so they are literally made from their own surroundings. Water is mixed with soil in the pit to make a thick mud, reinforced with straw, from which bricks can be cut. These are then laid out in the sun to dry, mere footsteps away from the foundations of the structure they will create.



The doors and window frames are cut with hand saws from local, fast-growing eucalyptus. Sheathing on the door is invariably a skin of sheet metal recycled from a disused oil drum that has finally become so battered in its various transits that it can serve no other purpose. The top and bottom are cut off and bent into bowls or other vessels, and then the drum is sliced lengthwise, beaten flat into a rectangular panel, and nailed to the door. Although most are pounded to a rust-speckled patina, on some Rwandan front doors it is still possible to read an oil company logo, sideways: Shell, Fina, etc.



From a global warming perspective, compare the carbon footprint of a house like this with the one left by even our most basic structure. Our 2X4s are forested and lumbered with diesel-burning machinery and milled using energy intensive industrial processes thousands of miles, and sometimes continents away from where they will be used. Our steels girders are shipped from South Korea, the gypsum in our wallboard mined who knows where. The fasteners come from China on ships registered conveniently to circumvent any inconvenient niceties regarding emissions and engine efficiency.

I don't mean to suggest that Rwandan vernacular architecture, or for that matter, any architecture of grinding poverty, grew out of environmentalist sentiment. The first improvement a house here will see, given a bit of money coming into the household, is the plastering of the interior and exterior walls with cement, the bottom rung on the upwards ladder of purchases requiring actual cash money, and the first material that will come from outside the community. The next, and in this context an almost middle class progression, would be to build from cinderblock or fired brick, and the owner would feel no nostalgia for the earthen walls of his ancestral village.

There is no doubt that the African mud-brick house springs from an architecture of convenience and necessity, of opportunism and economy, and of realism in the face of extraordinarily limited financial possibilities. But that does not mean that we should not learn from it. So-called "development" remains a goal and an aspiration across the globe, something almost universally accepted to have a positive connotation. (Who is in favor of "underdevelopment"?). The elimination of poverty and corruption, the improving of education, health care, and human rights are all thought to require it. But if development has brought us to the brink of self-sponsored extinction as a species, without even considering the grotesque arrogance by which we have already extinguished so many other "lesser" species in its name, then we need to do some serious rethinking.

A Monsoon comes to Brooklyn (sell your waterfront property now dept.)

The Pacific navigators of yore leaned out of their proas and observed the angle of the chop of the waves before glancing at the distant horizon to read there a comprehensive meteorological report. Millennia ago, our species could smell as well as many others; alert heads turned at the distant wafted whiff of a predator; our ears pricked up at the scent of potential prey. Today, although in many ways alleged to be more advanced, we have lost those skills. Therefore, I may be wrong when I say that this summer, the sky over Brooklyn has a new and troubling aspect, an ominous look never before seen in these latitudes. There is an inexorable, rolling, bruised eggplant character to clouds that bring waves of rain, falling in sheets before passing quickly on, leaving a churning purple mass to reconstitute itself in the sky. Evening after evening a narrow slit of sulphurous yellow lies to the west, behind the Statue of Liberty, crushed under thick, gray, swirling cotton fit to burst, the sorts of clouds that in all my many travels have always served to announce and reinforce an arrival in the tropics. Here in Brooklyn we have, suddenly, heavy, wet, oppressive skies straight out of the Guatemalan rainy season, weather that one might expect to seeing gathering on the Amazonian horizon or lurking behind an Indonesian island in a Joseph Conrad novel. It is something alien, a Philippine typhoon gathering above New York harbor.

In other news, it is 105 degrees plus in southern Romania, as if it were August in the Sahara.

These things are not normal.

Sell your waterfront property now dept.

One of the most compelling segments in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was the terrifying presentation of a series of before-and-after photographs of glaciers around the globe, all melting faster than a stick of butter at the bottom of a dutch oven. I remember one of the examples being a glacier in New Zealand, although I can't remember which one. It could well have been the Fox Glacier, which has been naturally receding for the last several hundreds of years, but is now retreating up its valley at an alarming rate. It is already a good half an hour's walk from the car park to the foot of the glacier, and shortly the hordes of tourists who drive up to see it will have to pack picnics and plan on making a full day's outing out of the visit.

Driving in from the main road one soon reaches a sign, posted at the edge of a nice patch of mature rain forest, reading "in 1750 the glacier reached here." It is a full ten more minutes of driving up the dirt access road before reaching the car park, which lies in the shadow of a mighty black basalt bluff several hundred feet high. A sign indicates that as recently as the 1600s, the glacier, now far up the valley, covered not only the car park but reached to the very top of the looming cliff. A display of bleached photographs charts the accelerated recession of the glacier almost since the invention of photography, a period almost exactly contemporaneous with our species' earth-baking, fossil-fuel-burning activities.

Fox is entirely unlike the glaciers I saw recently in Antarctica, which were taught and polished, with pristine crevasses tinted an unrelenting dry blue, massive ice-cliffs suggesting dominance and eternity. Instead Fox glacier is wet and sooty, dripping, calving, hot and bothered. A foaming, gushing cascade of fully-formed river emerges like a mighty sweat from the bottom of the ice. The glacier itself looks like an enormous pile of the slushy rubble left over from snow-plowing operations and running with rivulets of water in the first breath of spring.

As the planet warms, a raging torrent of milky meltwater gushes out from the foot of the glacier


A couple of posts ago, while describing a descent of Mt. Fyffe, near Kaikoura, I disparaged the most excellent New Zealand Dept. of Conservation, which administers hundreds of fabulous wildlife areas and spectacular campsites, by suggesting that their casually advertised riverside walk back to the carpark there might well have benefitted from "some industrial hazard warning signs of the yellow and black variety, featuring an icon of a man hip deep in raging rapids, waving his arms for balance...." I don't know whether to be pleased that it turns out they actually have these or even more upset, since none of them were posted there. In fact, judging by the abundance of signage at the glacier, it seems probable that the D.O.C. blew its entire budget on the warning signs in use at Fox and didn't have enough left over to put up any notices anywhere else.

Warning: crumbling glacier may cause tsunami

Warning: do not boogie down underneath the glacial overhang, as the funky disco vibrations emanating from your groovy self may cause enormous chunks of ice to break off and crush you

Warning: don't think that you are safe just because you are not disco-dancing in front of the glacier. Just plain old rocks may fall from the surrounding cliffs onto your head at any time

On the rocks with salt, please: delicious many-thousands-of-years-old ice plucked from the raging glacial outflow. I contracted a wicked ice-cream headache from chewing on the stuff


Although this looks much like the shoulder of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway a couple of days after a heavy New York City snowfall, it is actually the front edge of the rapidly melting Fox Glacier