or less—are not people trying to speak
for the trees, but people trying to tell their
own stories in relation to them.
Good art wakes us up to the world,
helping us see things in their uniqueness,
and their interconnectedness too. Katie
Holten started the project by spending a
lot of time getting her own head into that
place. She walked the Grand Concourse
daily, learning its cadences. Then she began drawing the trees. As she talked to
people in the neighborhood, their stories
began to emerge. The drawings, which are
exquisite, include the root systems below
the ground as well as the branching tree
above. A tree is a network, connecting
earth and air, and the Grand Concourse is
a network too, interweaving people, buildings, roads, plants, and animals.
Walking the Tree Museum, Bob and I
noticed the di=erent shapes Norway maples can take. We watched two people feed
peanuts to a squirrel at the foot of an amur
corktree, and we eavesdropped on the flirtation between a pushcart empanada
salesman and his customer, not far from a
pin oak wearing a yellow ribbon. We marveled at the ginkgo with a branch that perfectly echoed the cobra-head streetlamp
nearby, as if it dreamed of sprouting light,
and we missed a tree because we were eyeballing the spectacular cakes in the window of the Spanish bakery. In short, we
took some time to admire the ecosystem
they call the Bronx. At one point, as we
stood gazing up at a callery pear, a red-tailed hawk glided overhead. It might have
been Pale Male. In that moment, the noise
of the city really did recede and the world
was reduced to a haikulike presentness: a
tree, a sky, a hunting bird. The hawk
glided south, toward Manhattan, and we
walked north, toward our train.
Ginger Strand is a 2009/2010 New York
Foundation for the Arts fellow in nonfiction
and a contributing editor at Orion.
Eaarth
BY BILL MCKIBBEN
Times Books, 2010. $24.00, 272 pages.
THE plAnET wE lIvE On is changing so
fast — and so relentlessly — that, according
to Bill McKibben, it needs a new name.
McKibben dubs our increasingly hot,
hungry, and disease-prone
globe “Eaarth.”
Twenty years ago,
McKibben wrote the first
book about global warm-
ing for a popular audi-
ence. The End of Nature
was prescient. In the late
eighties, it was hard to
find tangible evidence of
climate change; neverthe-
less, McKibben saw the
dangers ahead and warned
the world. Now, as he docu-
ments in Eaarth, the evidence of climate
change is so overwhelming there’s no
avoiding it (although denialists still try to).
The fire season in California is nearly
three months longer than it used to be;
the glaciers in Montana’s Glacier National
Park are disappearing; and millions of
acres of forest in the Rockies have been
killed off by beetles that, in a warmer world,
can complete their lifecycles in half the
time that it took them just a few decades
ago. In McKibben’s home state of Ver-
mont, “heavy precipitation events”—the
kind that can drop several inches of rain
in a single day—once were rare occur-
rences. Now they happen pretty much ev-
ery year, and sometimes more often.
(Since warmer air holds more water vapor,
“heavy precipitation events” are linked to
higher temperatures.) In the summer of
2008, one such storm destroyed the only
road through the town McKibben lives in.
This is “our reality,” he writes. “We’ve
changed the planet.” Further damage is
not just likely; it’s inevitable.
So what are we to do? First off, McKibben argues, we’re going to have to stop
pursuing growth —at least the kind that
takes the form of bigger houses and bigger cars and more stuff. Instead, we need
to start the process of deliberately scaling back. We can’t continue to depend
on commodities shipped halfway around
the world, but must learn—or, really,
we still must live on the world we’ve created— lightly, carefully, gracefully.”
— Elizabeth Kolbert
The Name of the
Nearest River
BY ALEX TAYLOR
Sarabande Books, 2010. $15.95, 184 pages.
wHEn FlAnnERy O’cOnnOR insisted
that a good short story will resist summary and paraphrase because its mystery
and power depend on the reader’s experiencing the author’s creation, she may
well have been gazing into a crystal ball
and foretelling the work of Alex Taylor.
Taylor’s debut collection, The Name of the
Nearest River, thwarts any neat categorization. It is realism and tall tale, dirty realism and magical realism, tragedy and
comedy. It is North, South, East, and
West, the past and the present, and the
borderlands in between. It recalls Cormac
