1. BLACKSMITHING
To learn how to live in a post-petroleum world, recall the pre-petroleum world where blacksmiths made everything: tools, nails, hinges, lamps, hooks, gates, and railings. Wheels, even! With a barrel and some fire, a blacksmith could turn rusted car panels into cookware. Think of all the scrap metal we’ll have when the oil’s all gone.

2. KNOT TYING
Find a shoelace and a copy of The Shipping News. Knots can weave rugs, fashion snowshoes, repair almost anything. A diamond hitch holds a load on a mule or a sled. A bowline to cinch a tarp, a Prusik to climb a tree. While fighting a forest fire, a friend once fixed a shovel with parachute cord, half-hitches, and pine pitch. And when the parachute cord runs out, there’s plenty of sinew. From knot tying, it’s a short hop to basketry.

3. CROSSCUT SAW SHARPENING
Crosscuts are remarkably effective. Not chainsaw fast, not ax slow either. Problem is, since anyone can use one, anyone can ruin one by dragging it through dirt. Good ones haven’t been made for seventy years, so this lost art may be in high demand. Pick up a file, spider set, and how-to manual on eBay for about twenty bucks.

4. GRAFTING
The Homestead Act required settlers to prove-up by planting fruit trees. Nothing symbolized self-sufficiency more. But plant an apple seed and—as anyone who’s read Michael Pollan knows—you get sour apples. To get sizable, recognizable fruit, you graft. Heritage apple guru Tom Burford encourages everyone who knows how to graft to teach five others. My partner started by teaching the kids at the local one-room school. Her advice: bring Band-aids.

5. NAVIGATING BY THE STARS
If the Polynesians could crisscross the Pacific without a GPS, we can too. Read Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki for inspiration and Chet Raymo’s 365 Starry Nights for elucidation. Few of us will build a balsa raft, true, but remember: before planes, trains, and automobiles, travel by water was faster and easier than by land. Less light pollution will certainly help us find our way.

6. HANDWRITING
In seventh grade the nuns forced me to practice cursive for three weeks straight, which seemed pointless and cruel in the Apple II era. But maybe the nuns were on to something. How will we communicate without LED screens? Smoke signals?

7. HOARDING
Once my partner and I tried to install a used cast-iron sink in the bathroom only to find we needed an antique hanger and fixtures to boot. An old-timer neighbor kicked his boot toe into some fir needles in his yard and—voilà!—Restoration Hardware in the duff. Hoarding gets a bad rap when there’s a Home Depot on every corner, but not reducing might actually be the key to recycling and reusing.

8. RIGGING
Mechanical advantage doesn’t require fuel. A pulley or block and tackle magnifies force, so you can lift heavier loads with less effort. No crane or excavator needed. A grip hoist or come-along requires no energy source but your own. You’ll appreciate the addictive magic of this fact when you’ve lifted a thousand-pound footbridge all by your 120-pound self. Believe me.

9. HOUSEGUEST HOSTING
Ask people in the developing world or anyone who travels by foot, and they’ll tell you: if it takes a long time to get somewhere, you’re going to stay a while. So we need to be prepared. Keep clean sheets on hand. Save up on food. And patience.

10. SLEEPING
Early to bed, late to rise, saves on lamp oil and firewood. Plus, sleeping saves energy, mostly your own. It also keeps you healthy. Lack of sleep has been linked to heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure, obesity, psychiatric disorders, and poor quality of life. Why wait for the power reserves to run dry? Start now and get a jump on the future.

What would you add to this list? Tell us in the comments section, below, and read more Enumeration entries at www.orionmagazine.org/enumeration.

IMAGINE MY SHOCK. I was living in Massachusetts for the first time. Adjusting. The first time I saw snow falling past my Somerville apartment window, I told a woman on the phone that a neighbor was on the roof shaking out a pillow. Not many snowstorms in my desertified homeland. The first time I saw ice on the sidewalk, I thought a prankster had smeared Vaseline on the bricks to watch businessmen fall down.

This old world was all new to me. I was manhandled by quotidian revelations, wrenched by the duende of Yankee cultural hoodoo. So when I realized I could walk over to Porter Square (where the porterhouse steak was first hacked out of some Bostonian cow) and catch a commuter train to Concord, to Walden freakin’ Pond, I was off and running.

Perhaps I was a barrio Transcendentalist. Well, I was certainly one by the time I hit the San Diego ’burbs in my tweens. I loved me some Thoreau. “Civil Disobedience,” right? What Doors fan couldn’t get behind that? I also had copied passages of “Self Reliance” by Emerson and pasted them to my walls amid posters of hot rods and King Kong and John Lennon and trees. Even in the ’70s, I was deeply worried about trees.

So I trudged to the T stop and went down to the suburban rail level and caught the Purple Line. I, and all the rambunctious Concord high school kids, were deeply plugged into our Walkmans. I was all Screaming Blue Messiahs and class rage, scribbling in my notebooks about rich bastards giggling self-indulgently and shrieking “Eau my GWOD!” at each other as they ignored the woods and the mangy deer outside. For me, it was a Disneyland train ride, all this stuff I had only experienced robotically before. I was imagining the ditch diggers from my old neighborhood tripping out over all this water. These goddamned New Englanders had water everywhere. And deer.

We pulled into Concord as if it were a normal thing, and I detrained and stepped into the Friendly’s. At the time, if I could have had deep-tissue grafts of Americana I would have, and a striped-awning ice cream place where the happy lady called me “Deah” was just about the shiniest moment of my Americanness to date.

“I’m looking for Walden,” I announced. “Pond.” Helpful-like, as if she didn’t know.

“Right out the door.” Doah. “Go out and walk about a mile.”

I drank some soda. She called it “tonic.” And I was off. She didn’t tell me I had to turn south. I turned north. And walked away.

BEFORE WE PROCEED much farther on our first New England early autumn country walk, before we grow dizzy with red maples actually turning red in a natural psychedelic blowmind, we might consider the dearth of what you might call “ponds” where I come from. To me, a pond was a muddy hole you could jump across, and it housed six or seven crawdads and some tadpoles. (My friend Mark put dead polliwogs in a jar with hand lotion and charged kids a nickel to look at “elephant sperm.” We were guttersnipe naturalists.) When Thoreau said, “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,” I thought I knew what he was talking about, though my stream was rain-shower runoff in an alley. I had been fishing exactly once in my life, and I felt guilt about the poor worm that came out of the water not only impaled on the hook but stiff as a twig.

So there I was, marching at a splendid pace! Away to Walden Pond! Or, as my homeboys would have spelled it, GUALDENG! Delighted by every tree! White fences! Orange and yellow and scarlet leaves! Concord thinned and vanished and I was suddenly among farms! Huzzah! Well-met, shrieking farm dogs threatening me! Bonjour, paranoiac farm wives hanging laundry and glaring at me from fields of golden, uh, barley! Eau my gwod! I saw stacks of lobster pots. I saw pumpkins. It was a shock to me that pumpkins grew somewhere. Next to lobster pots! And a red tractor to boot.

Behold the festive black-and-white New England moo-cow. Scenes bucolic and poetic—scenes the Alcotts might have penned. Sad autumn light, what a hipster pal in Harvard Square had called “Irish light,” slanted through the trees to make everything tremble with the most delicious melancholy I have yet to see again. I was bellowing along to Sisters of Mercy: “Oh Marian, this world is killing me.” Cows regarded me. Goths in paradise.

Right about then, I beheld it. In a field of mown hay. Next to a small house and a slanty barn. Walden Pond. It was about twenty feet across and surrounded by meditative heifers. I removed my headphones and went to the fence and leaned upon the topmost rail and communed with the transcendent. I wrestled with man’s fate and the epic movements of the universe and the natural splendour of the Creator’s delight in the temple of His Creation.

The farmer came out of his house and stared at me. I waved. He jumped in his truck and banged over ruts in his field. He wasn’t smiling.

“I help you?” he shouted.

“Just looking at the pond,” said I.

“What pond?”

“Walden Pond!”

“Jesus Christ!” he reasoned. He looked back at his cows. He looked at me. He looked at the cows. He said, “You’re not from around here, are ya?”

“California,” I said.

“That explains it.”

What ho, my good fellow!

“You walked the wrong damned direction. It’s about four mile that way.”

I looked back, as though the great pond would reveal itself in the autumnal haze.

“Could you give me a ride?” I asked.

“Hell no!”

He smoked as he watched me trudge back toward Concord with a slightly less splendid cadence.

YEAH, WHATEVER. Barking dogs. Screw you. Farm wives gawking. What’s your problem? My feet hurt. Past Friendly’s. Don’t do me any favors, Deah. And south, out of town again, across the crazed traffic on the highway, and past a tumbledown trailer park and a garbage dump. What is this crap? Tijuana?

Gradually, I became aware of a bright blue mass to my right. A sea. A Great Lake. This deal wasn’t a pond, man. Are you kidding? Who called this Sea of Cortez a pond?

Down to the water. A crust of harlequin leaves lay along the shore. It was dead silent. Thin wisps of steam rode the far shoreline. I squatted and watched and fancied myself living in a shack, smoking my pipe, scratching out one-liners with a quill, changing the world.

An ancient Dalmatian came along. He was stiff and arthritic, walking at an angle, grinning and making horking sounds. His tag said his name was Jason.

“Jason,” I said. “I’m looking for Thoreau.”

“Snork,” he said, and headed out. I followed. We walked past cove and bog and found ourselves at Henry’s stone floor. The cairn of stones left by travelers. I was glad my homeys did not see me cry over mere rocks.

The shack was about the size of my small bedroom back home in San Diego. I put my hand on the old pines and felt Henry’s bark against my palm. Jason sneezed and thumped along to his own meditations. The pond moved in slow motion before us, Henry and me. A train rolled past the far trees like some strange dream.

Crows went from shadow to shadow, arguing.

Was it just me, or did I smell pipe tobacco burning?

I placed my stone on the cairn. I tipped my collar to my chin. Fall turned cold fast in those days. “Adios, Enrique,” I said. Then I headed back to town for a hot cup of coffee and a ride home on a dark train.

MY CHILDREN have snow anxiety. For the record, this started in the winter of 2011–12 when no snow fell—at all—and sleds, saucers, skis, and snowball makers sat dejectedly on the porch, unused, next to the irrelevant and despondent snow shovel. Week after week, month after month, Faith and Elijah scanned the skies and studied the forecast. When June-like temperatures hit in March, the sight of the toboggan filled them with so much despair that they wordlessly dragged it back to the barn and put it in storage.

Which did not go unnoticed by their dad and me. When had our kids ever put stuff away without being asked? It was as unprecedented as a snowless winter in upstate New York. Nobody had ever experienced that either.

During the unfrozen winter of 2011–12, the grown-ups all walked around saying, “This is crazy!” True enough. When the temperature in the mudroom hits eighty degrees before the daytime:nighttime ratio hits parity, some synonym for insane is what the thesaurus should take you to. But “This is crazy!” also implies that we possess no rational explanation for June arriving in March. And I noticed that my son and his friends never said things like that to each other. They spoke more grimly, along the lines of, Global warming. It’s here. Now we can’t go sledding. Probably ever. So what do you want to do, dude?

When snow and ice finally fell in April—hard enough and fast enough to cancel school—it fell on tulip and magnolia petals and killed off the entire cherry crop.

The toboggan stayed in the barn.

But wishful thinking springs anew in the hearts of children, even in the face of permanent catastrophe, so, after a cherryless summer and a fall with few apples, Faith and Elijah conferred hopefully about the upcoming winter. Last year was a global warming winter. But maybe global warming winters come only every other year. Maybe this year would be normal.

The snow fell. The sleds came out. The snow melted.

The snow fell again. And turned to rain. The ground thawed and great lakes of water filled the low areas, and the sleds that had been parked at the bottoms of sledding hills across the county bobbed around like flotillas of small boats at harbor.

The sight of floating sleds made the adults say, “It’s crazy!” all over again.

The kids just gave up. Let the record show that in February 2013, the children of Trumansburg, New York, gave up on winter. As a season, it was no longer reliable. You could wake up in the morning to a wonderland—snowflakes dutifully falling, the front yard all white, perfect, hushed, squeaky—and by the time school let out in the afternoon, the miraculous world had already reverted back to brown, gray, mushy, yucky.

“Don’t get excited,” said Faith to Elijah right before Valentine’s Day when he looked out the window at first light and announced a fresh snowfall. “It won’t last.”

My children were born just before and after the turn of the century. They are old enough to reminisce about the days before winter went bad and became the crazy uncle in the seasonal family. Faith’s fashionable friends discuss the clothes they used to wear—month after arctic month—when they were little and the snow was piled high from November to March. Kids today, they note with disinterested interest, just don’t have the same relationship to their snow pants.

I think I’m on to something here, and I’d like to make a prediction. I predict that the cohort of kids who are now ten to fifteen years old are going to have a very different worldview than those born just a few years after them. My kids and their friends and everyone roughly their age will, in fact, be the last human beings to remember a stable, predictable procession of seasons.

Let me put a finer point on this. My kids, who are in middle school, know that winter is supposed to be cold and that January pond ice should be thick enough for skating. They possess snowman-making techniques, snow-fort construction skills, and an elaborate ethos about exactly what kind of snowballs can and can’t be used for ambushing the friends of one’s sibling and what body parts are and are not off-limits (no ice balls, never in the face). They have methods for assessing the slide-ability and pack-ability of any given snowfall. They know which methods of tucking snow pants into snow boots work and which leak. They have strong opinions on gloves versus mittens and the proper way to make a snow angel. And yet, for the last two years, they have had almost no opportunity to exercise this knowledge.

Meanwhile, a friend calls to tell me that her otherwise very bright granddaughter, who is of nursery-school age, is having trouble learning the names of the seasons. They make no sense to her. “But grandma, you said that winter was cold!” Winter, when she said it, wasn’t. And there was the added problem of the forsythias. They bloomed this year during a warm spell that spanned the twelve days of Christmas. April showers bring May flowers. When the nursery rhymes no longer match the empirical evidence, what’s a three-year-old to think?

Here are two more stories for the record. Because of climate change, Elijah gave up on Little House in the Big Woods. He liked the first half. But the episodes involving horse-drawn sleighs and maple-syrup snow cones were too painful. He refused to read on. “It’s not that way anymore, Mom,” he said matter-of-factly, and set the book aside.

I was stunned. But then it happened to me. While rereading the poem “Corsons Inlet” by A. R. Ammons—“I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning / to the sea, / then turned right along / the surf”—which had once been the subject of my own master’s thesis, I found that I couldn’t go on. It’s not that way anymore, Archie. And how come, in 1965, you didn’t see it coming? Corson’s Inlet, a last undeveloped stretch of beach in New Jersey, was destroyed during Hurricane Sandy.

I set the book aside. Matter-of-factly.

Not to say that our hearts have all turned to stone around here. Here’s my other story: After days of wild, record-breaking weather, our village winter festival was canceled because of rain and flood warnings. When I told Elijah the bad news on the walk home from school, he began to cry. I told him I was sorry.

He said, “I’m not upset about the festival. I’m upset because the planet’s dying. I know this is all because of global warming.”

This is what I heard myself say: “Look, Mom is on the job. I’m working on it. I’m working on it really hard, and I promise I won’t quit.”

And then I cried. And not only because my son believes himself to be alive on a dying planet, but because all the generations of parents before mine have been unable to deal with the facts and mount a response of sufficient scale to solve the problem, meaning that all of us now have a monumental task before us. I cried because keeping my promise makes me arise before dawn to get on buses, puts bullhorns in my hand in faraway cities, may yet land me in jail, and, in these and other ways, takes me away from my children so that I can prove them wrong.

Para leer en Español, mire la página abajo.

ALTHOUGH GREEN SEA TURTLES have inhabited the Pacific coast of Mexico for millions of years, for the past few decades these ancient mariners (known locally as tortugas prietas or “black turtles”) have struggled to survive a relentless onslaught of hunting. As recently as the early 1980s, there were still some twenty-five thousand of their nests each year along the Mexican coast. But as demand grew for turtle meat and eggs in Mexico and across the U.S. border, turtle hunting multiplied exponentially. When the Mexican government outlawed the trafficking of sea turtles in 1990, turtle hunters were labeled poachers and smugglers overnight, but the practice continued. By the mid-1990s, poaching, fishing nets, and habitat pollution and destruction had caused the number of nesting females to drop to less than five hundred.

It was at this time that a doctoral student named Wallace J. Nichols proposed studying the biology and conservation of sea turtles in northwestern Mexico for his thesis, but was told that cultural inertia was too great to overcome and it was too late to even bother trying. Undeterred, Nichols and a colleague traveled to Baja California to study the five species of sea turtle that congregate on both sides of the peninsula’s nineteen hundred miles of coastline to feast on crab, jellyfish, sea sponges, and algae.

With the help of a fisherman and a Mexican biologist, Nichols attached a transmitter to a captured loggerhead’s shell. The turtle, named Adelita after the fisherman’s daughter, swam seven thousand miles from Baja California to nesting grounds in Japan, marking the first time any animal had been tracked swimming across an ocean. The experience convinced Nichols that the best way to change cultural habits was to earn the trust and respect of a local population, rather than alienate them through guilt and reams of scientific data.

“These turtles are big, strong, and wild—yet gentle,” Nichols says of these 150-pound sea creatures. “And you can get close to them and interact with them. There aren’t many creatures that big that you can do that with in the wild, and on their own terms. My goal was to share that sense of wonder; not to preach.” So Nichols invited dozens of turtle-hunting fishermen to a meeting to talk about their knowledge of local turtles and the possibility of their extinction. In time, many of the poachers agreed to catch and eat fewer turtles—which are traditionally prized for their red-meat-like flesh—and soon began working with Nichols to monitor local turtle populations and collect data.

Twenty years later, Grupo Tortuguero, the grassroots network that Nichols helped found, is active in fifty coastal communities. Hundreds of local volunteers, many of whom are former poachers, work to protect and promote an appreciation for and pride in these gentle animals. Says Nichols, “If given the chance, who wouldn’t want the opportunity to tell their grandkids that they helped rescue from extinction an animal that’s so central to their culture?”

This year there were some fifteen thousand green sea turtle nests on the beaches of southern Mexico.

                                                            — Andrew D. Blechman


See more multimedia from the May/June 2013 issue at www.orionmagazine.org/multimedia.


El Ascenso de la Tortuga Negra
Una exitosa historia de conservación

Fotografías de Neil Ever Osborne
Traducción Antonio Diego-Fernández R.

AUNQUE LAS TORTUGAS NEGRAS han habitado el Océano por millones de años, en las últimas décadas estos antiguos marineros (conocidos en México como tortugas prietas) han sufrido para sobrevivir al implacable embate de la cacería por sus huevos y su carne. A principios de los años 80, todavía habían aproximadamente 25 mil nidos cada año a lo largo de la costa mexicana. Pero conforme la demanda por su carne y huevos creció en México y Estados Unidos, la cacería de tortuga aumentó exponencialmente. Cuando el Gobierno Mexicano prohibió el comercio con Tortugas Marinas en 1990, de un día para otro aquellos que las trabajaban fueron catalogados como ladrones y cazadores furtivos. Esto no impidió que el tráfico continuara. Para mediados de los 90s, la caza furtiva, las redes de pesca, la contaminación y destrucción de su hábitat provocaron que el número de hembras y nidos fueran menos de 500.

En este periodo un estudiante de doctorado llamado Wallace J. Nichols propuso estudiar la biología y conservación de las Tortugas Marinas en el Noroeste de México para su tesis. Su proyecto no fue bien recibido por los académicos pues se pensaba que está ya era una batalla perdida.

Tercamente, Nichols, y un colega viajaron a Baja California para estudiar las 5 especies de Tortugas marinas que se congregan en ambos lados de los 3,000 Km. de costa para alimentarse de cangrejos, medusas, algas marinas y esponjas.

Con la ayuda de un pescador y un biólogo mexicano, Nichols colocó un transmisor a una tortuga caguama. La tortuga, llamada Adelita como la hija del pescador, nadó 11,200 Km. desde Baja California a su zona de anidación en Japón, resultando ser la primera vez que un animal era rastreado cruzando el Océano. La experiencia convenció a Nichols que la mejor manera de cambiar hábitos culturales era ganándose la confianza y el respeto de las comunidades pesqueras locales en vez de culparlas y atacarlas con datos científicos.

¨Estas tortugas son grandes, fuertes y salvajes—pero también son gentiles¨, comenta Nichols sobre estas creaturas de más de 200 kilos.¨ Uno puede acercarse a ellas e interactuar. No existen muchos animales tan grandes con los que uno pueda interactuar en lo salvaje, y en sus propios términos. Mi meta fue compartir esa maravillosa sensación, sin sermonear a nadie.¨ De esta manera Nichols comenzó a invitar a docenas de pescadores de tortugas a un reunión para hablar acerca de su conocimiento sobre las tortugas y la posibilidad de su extinción. Con el tiempo, muchos de estos pescadores aceptaron capturar y comer menos tortuga—que es consumida por su excepcional carne roja—y pronto comenzaron a trabajar en conjunto monitoreando poblaciones locales de tortuga y recolectando datos.

20 años después, Grupo Tortuguero, la red de conservación que Nichols ayudó a fundar, esta activa en 50 comunidades costeras en todo el Noroeste de México. Cientos de voluntarios, muchos de los cuales solían cazar tortugas, trabajan para proteger y promover la apreciación y el orgullo por estas magníficas especies. Dice Nichols, ¨Si llegara el momento, ¿quién no quisiera tener la oportunidad de decirle a sus nietos que ellos ayudaron a rescatar de la extinción a las tortugas marinas?¨

Este año se registraron 15 mil nidos de tortuga negra en las playas del Sur de México.

                                                            — Andrew D. Blechman

I AM ON ALL FOURS on the Lake Superior shore, ogling the contents of a pothole: pebbles and cobbles, water, and the sun’s direct rays. Shirt sleeves rolled, I survey the colors—muted purples, greens, yellows, and blacks. I choose a stone, then reach in to retrieve it. So the process goes: like a god selecting souls, I compile a handful of stones, then move to the next pothole to see what it has to offer.

When we get home, my husband buys two field guides: Is This an Agate? and Lake Superior Rocks & Minerals. I’ve never been adept at identifying rocks. This granite we found—pink and speckled as a kestrel egg—is composed of quartz, mica, and feldspar. There is feldspar again in a pepper-colored rock I think might be diabase, but here the feldspar is mixed with augite and possibly hornblende, magnetite or olivine. You can see how things get complicated.

The difficulty goes deeper than simple composition. When identifying a rock, you often must detect the almost unfathomable process that melded its minerals together. Several of my rocks could be quartz or metamorphosed sandstone—quartz subjected to high temperatures and pressure, which would make them quartzite. The only difference, my field guide says, is that quartzite has a little more texture. Identifying rocks, it seems, is more about parts than wholes, more about process than product. It is less about naming what you’ve found than about understanding how that thing came to be. In this case, how volcanoes, glaciers, and plate tectonics, over billions of years, produced and changed the rocks I hold in my hand. And how ten thousand years of wave action in Lake Superior smoothed them into something I want to take with me.

With flowers, categorizing is a simple matching game: look at the flower, look at the field guide picture. Is it the same size, shape, and color? Even birds, which can disappear in an instant, aren’t as perplexing to me as the rocks I can carry home to study with the aid of a library of reference books. Once, at a relative’s cabin in northern Wisconsin, an odd bird landed on the deck seemingly just to confound us. Warbler-sized, the bird was a bright olive green with black wings and tail, blotches of white on its underside, and speckles and blotches of neon orange on its throat, head, and belly. It looked like a parakeet. But even without internet, and with only a few generic field guides dug out of a neighbor’s basement, we identified it within three hours: a molting male scarlet tanager.

My understanding of rocks seems to go only as far as the broad divisions taught in grade school, and even on these categories I don’t have a firm hold. So I look up definitions. Igneous rocks are basically cooled lava. Sedimentary rocks are compacted, cemented-together pieces of other broken-up rocks. And metamorphic rocks are rocks that have changed form. A University of Oregon website states: “Just as any person can be put into one of two main categories of human being, all rocks can be put into one of three fundamentally different types of rocks.” Though the website clearly defines the rock types, it doesn’t say anything about the two categories of human being, and I can’t help thinking about the options that lie beyond the obvious divisions of male and female. Gay or straight? Accepted or marginalized? Convinced or uncertain?

I LIKE TO ROAM the forest naming things. Wood anemone. Rue anemone. False rue anemone. I wonder what makes the third one false: its more deeply lobed leaves, its slightly smaller flowers? It’s a buttercup, like the other two; but not, my Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide indicates, an anemone.

When I was an environmental educator, I taught a class called Stone Wall Study. I hiked my mostly elementary-aged students to a wall—one with its upper boulders spilled in the sun and gaps through which two could pass abreast—and asked them to speculate on the wall’s original purpose, as well as to investigate the distinct habitats it now delineated. On one side was a red pine plantation; on the other, a mixed deciduous forest. Which side of the wall looks more natural? I would ask. Did the wall keep something out or something in? Once, during the class, I thought I had discovered a new species: on the wild side of the wall was what looked like an anemone with multiple tiers of petals, its flower a fancy petticoat, like some kind of double hybrid. When I couldn’t find it in my books, I brought a local biology professor to check it out. Not a new species, he said, just an anemone with some kind of odd gene.

I don’t know how well my students could imagine the farmer’s sons who dutifully dug the rocks from the soil and piled them on the wall to provide safety for a few dairy cows, or the Civilian Conservation Corps crew that planted the red pines in the deserted pasture one hundred years later. Even with more life experience than my students, I myself have trouble imagining what I can’t see, and what has occurred over a period of time longer than a lifespan. I am baffled by the process that created the rock, known as Shawangunk conglomerate, of which this particular wall was composed. I’ve always been plagued with a mental deficit for understanding composition, processes, and change—the kind of thinking the stones I have brought home from Lake Superior also demand—and this deficit has extended far beyond my ability to properly identify our planet’s rocky foundations.

All my life I’ve battled a sort of dyslexia of cause and effect. On a recent canoe trip, I was mystified by a high browse line on the trees overhanging a lake. Did the deer stand in the water and dine? How tall could the deer possibly be? I wondered, until someone explained that in winter the lake froze, and they walked across the ice to graze. A weirder example: growing up in the early ’80s, I lived for a while under the fear that contracting AIDS turned you gay. My older sister set me straight, telling me AIDS actually killed you. It didn’t make you gay; gay people got it. I was, initially, relieved: if I contracted AIDS I wouldn’t turn gay, only die. (Now, older and away from religious and family creeds, this response, of course, is embarrassing.) But almost immediately a seemingly darker worry surfaced: without a disease to cause homosexuality, how could I be sure to avoid this “affliction”? (For, at the time, that is what I had gathered from society that homosexuality was.) “How do you know if you’re gay?” I asked my sister. The question arose from a presexual mind—one that couldn’t yet fathom romantic love or physical attraction to anything. “You just wake up one morning and you know,” was her response.

I couldn’t understand how one day you would not know and the next you would, so I imagined it must be like getting your period—a milestone still many years off for me. I assumed you would open your eyes one morning and pull back the covers to reveal, on the bed sheets, written in blood, the universe’s edict: gay or straight. I believed you had no say in the matter, that the issue was as tightly and long-ago cemented as a conglomerate’s quartz and pebbles.

The issue, though, is much more complex. Some evidence does point to sexual orientation as something people awaken to—an inborn predisposition. Identical twins are more likely to both be homosexual than fraternal twins or non-twin siblings. And having several older biological brothers—whether you live with them or not—slightly increases a man’s chance of being homosexual (from 3 percent to 5 percent), implying that the cause occurs prenatally. However, sexual orientation and sexual behavior are also considerably influenced by social and cultural factors. Among the Marind-anim people of southern Papua New Guinea, teen boys freely engage in homosexual relations with each other and with older married men, whereas all women are presumed heterosexual. In ancient Greece, men in their twenties permissibly wooed boys whose beards had yet to grow.

Perhaps my childhood fears were influenced by a society focused too much on sex and not enough on love. As it turns out, recent research and theory indicate that human sexuality—especially women’s—may harbor a subtle plasticity. Whether you fall into the category of heterosexual or homosexual, your sexuality may include a secondary characteristic that enables you to fall in love with people who contradict your sexual orientation. Regardless of any “odd” genes or environmental conditions (in womb or world) that may lead to one or another sexual orientation, love, it appears, is ultimately metamorphic.

ON THE NIGHT OF March 30, 1778, in Woodstock, Ireland, twenty-three-year-old Sarah Ponsonby donned men’s clothing, grabbed a pistol and her little dog, Frisk, then climbed out the parlor window of the Georgian mansion where she lived with the family of her first cousin, Irish aristocrat William Fownes.

Twelve miles away, at Kilkenny Castle at ten p.m. that same night, thirty-nine-year-old Eleanor Butler, daughter of one of the period’s most powerful Irish families, also put on men’s clothing and secretly mounted a horse bound for Woodstock. Once there, she hid in a barn and waited for her dear friend. Avoiding unwanted marriages, they planned to travel twenty-three miles to Waterford, board a boat for England, and withdraw to the countryside to live together. Their escape did not succeed. The two women were returned to their families, who were relieved that the elopements did not involve men, which would have undermined the ladies’ honor.

Sarah and Eleanor persisted, though, and openly now, in their desire to live together. Threatened with being sent to a convent, Eleanor escaped again, fled to the Ponsonby estate, snuck in through a hall window (aided by a housemaid), and hid in Sarah’s closet. A day later she was discovered, but instead of coming to retrieve his daughter, Eleanor Butler’s father sent word the two women could go away together. For ten days the Fownes family resisted, but when Sarah declared at all costs her one desire was “to live and die with Miss Butler,” they too relented. Early on a May morning the two ladies left, with Sarah’s housemaid, in a coach provided by the Butlers. Their journey ended in Llangollen, Wales, where they lived together for fifty years, studying literature and languages, writing letters and diaries, helping the poor, gardening, and running a small dairy. Despite keeping to themselves, they became widely known as “the ladies,” and later “the Ladies of Llangollen.”

For over a century, people have tried to identify what these two women were. Were they lesbians or, as we so diminutively tend to put it, were they just friends?

ATTEMPTING TO IDENTIFY my rocks, I pause at a page in the field guide between Jasper and Laumontite titled Junk. It is structured the same as every other page, with a map depicting junk’s occurrence along Lake Superior in the upper right corner and the same headings, like HARDNESS and STREAK, in the left margin. Next to SIZE the text reads: “Beach junk can be as small as a shard of glass or as large as furniture or appliances.” Next to WHERE TO LOOK the book says, “You can find beach junk all around the shores of Lake Superior.” It’s amusing to me that beach junk, though its name implies a lack of value, is important enough to have garnered a page in the guide and that, although the idea of beach junk having a universal hardness or streak is ludicrous, an attempt has been made to mold such a find into the accepted classification system of rocks and minerals. But I’m confused by the accompanying picture, which shows a porcelain tile, beach glass, rusty metal, an aluminum blob, slag glass, and a piece of driftwood. How does driftwood—something natural, something people collect—fit into the same category as discarded furniture and appliances—basically trash? I suppose it’s all about perspective. Like being “just friends” when you might be lovers, to a rockhound, even driftwood is junk.

MOST SCHOLARS call the eighteenth-century relationship enjoyed by the Ladies of Llangollen “romantic friendship”—a particularly intense, exclusive, intimate, asexual love between same-sex friends (either male or female) that may or may not include holding hands, cuddling, kissing, cohabitating, and sharing a bed. Though the term “romantic friendship” did not come into use until the nineteenth century, passionate nonerotic friendships had already existed and been considered ordinary for some time: Plato describes them in his Symposium, circa 385 bc; Montaigne describes them in his essay “Of Friendship,” dated mid-sixteenth century. During Victorian times, romantic friendships flourished between middle- and upper-class women, likely because Victorian men and women—even married couples—resided in two opposing worlds, marriages were often arranged, divorce was rarely sanctioned, and women were assumed to be uninterested in sex. Thus, ardent female friendships—like the relationship between Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby—were tolerated and even encouraged.

These relationships have been tagged with all sorts of labels. Intimate friendships between college-aged women were termed “smashes” in nineteenth-century literature. “Boston marriage,” another widely used phrase, originated in Henry James’s novel The Bostonians. The phrase “mummy-baby friendships” comes from studies in Lesotho, South Africa, where intimate relationships between younger girls and slightly older girls are part of the female social order. Yet another name, “Tom-Dee relationships,” is borrowed from Thailand; Tom is short for tomboy, and Dee for lady.

Even though contemporary America does have terms for intimate, nonsexual, same-sex relationships, such as “bromance” and “womance,” it’s hard for the modern American mind to understand and accept the concept. In the school where I teach, students titter at the way Brutus and Cassius speak of each other in Julius Caesar, throwing the words love and lover around shamelessly. According to Lillian Faderman, author of Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, society began scorning intimate same-sex friendships around 1920: “Such friendships are usually dismissed by attributing them to the facile sentimentality of other centuries, or by explaining them in neat terms such as ‘lesbian,’ meaning sexual proclivity. We have learned to deny such a depth of feeling toward anyone but a prospective or an actual mate.”

As Faderman implies, everything today must be about sex. The idea of romantic friendship washes up on the shores of our post-Freudian era like so much beach junk, its field marks smoothed through the last century into something difficult to identify but simple to lump into a single, discriminatory category: latent homosexuality.

THE LORD’s PRAYER of metamorphism goes like this: limestone to marble, sandstone to quartzite, shale to slate, granite to gneiss. I can recite it as if I am practicing for some kind of religious confirmation. But even as I utter the words, I don’t really understand them. I remember the rock cycle. Igneous rock can become sedimentary or metamorphic. Sedimentary rock can become igneous or metamorphic. Metamorphic rock can become igneous, sedimentary, or even a new kind of metamorphic. But I am baffled by any description of how these processes actually work.

Limestone to marble, sandstone to quartzite, shale to slate, granite to gneiss. I recite the words again. At what point does the granite become gneiss? On what day? At what hour? That old dyslexia kicks in. Where is the line or the moment in time that divides what it once was and what it now is? Metamorphism, my source says, is impossible to observe; it can only be studied after some sort of weathering, erosion, or uplift. Often the processes that caused the change are tricky to discern. And metamorphism is not sudden; it takes millions of years for rocks to change.

The changes that we suffer within ourselves can be just as incomprehensible. For a heterosexual, falling into a particularly intimate friendship with someone of the same sex (or, for a homosexual, someone of the opposite sex) can lead to a small crisis of identity when considered within the restrictive categories we currently use to describe relationships and sexuality. When Basil Hallward first saw Dorian in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, he stated, “I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.” I have met a woman like this.

SHE IS WHERE I have never been. She is almost always where I have never been. This time it is Biakpa, Ghana. Her husband is ill, in bed. She reads and looks for insects. She feeds grains of rice to three types of ant colonies, watches snails mate, finds a cigar-sized millipede. There are moths whose wings look like animal eyes or dead leaves, a green bug that looks like a green leaf, huge spiders, a caterpillar that hangs upside down from the ceiling with a tube that covers its body. Hard-skinned grubs stick to both the ceiling and the cement wall; their colors match what attracts them. She and the local kitty hunt in the evening. Where she crouches and looks, it crouches and looks, then it kills what she sees.

I know this because she has written me. In fact, what I have written above is almost entirely plagiarized—her version of herself, which she meant for only me to see. What I remember is her turning to laugh as she locked the cabin door before a hike during a three-day weekend in the woods, no husbands, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I was startled because I saw age in her face. The last time I had felt so close to a friend I was young. And this woman was as old as my mother was then, and I am old enough to be my mother then, and neither of us are mothers—which is beside the point, but maybe it isn’t. Inside us are half of each child we’ve never had and some small piece of all the women we’ve descended from. When I admire the distal edges of her fingernails, white and perfectly curved like the horizon of Ely, Minnesota, must have been the weekend she went mushing—which I read about on her travel blog (also there: a picture of her juggling with dried mud for some children along the Mekong River)—when I admire these things, it is because I love her passion for living.

One night, we are actually in the same place: full of seafood and wine, seated between our husbands at the musical Wicked. When the lovely Glinda, who becomes the Good Witch, sings to the emerald green Elphaba, future Wicked Witch of the West, “Because I knew you, I’ve been changed for good,” she whispers, “That’s us!” and grabs my hand. I am taken by surprise. I whisper back, joking, “I guess I’m Elphaba.” I say this because my friend is beautiful: hair the almost-black of the basalt I brought home from the lake, eyes as blue as the kind of cloudless sky that almost everywhere, you must patiently await.

For one week, in the month of July, I go to where she is. To her favorite place on earth: high desert, a place that’s made of circumstantial evidence—dry riverbeds, already eroded buttes and mesas, a beauty mute and built on abstinence. She plans a ten-mile loop hike at Capitol Reef National Park, which sounds marine but water is scarce here. We don’t have four-wheel drive so we have to hike five extra miles, round trip, to and from the trailhead. My husband comes along. Her husband stays back—at the end of our hike, he will meet us on the road, the blue plastic tub they use to wash their camp dishes filled with ice and a two-liter Diet Coke.

None of the dreams I had of hiking side-by-side, steeped in conversation, pan out because I hike much faster than she, especially on the uphills, which once or twice have made her faint. We hike to the lip of the waterpocket fold, a hundred-mile-long gash in the earth’s crust, the rocks on one side lifted seven thousand feet higher than the other. It is dry, beautiful, alien. But by the end of the fifteen miles, I trail behind her and my husband, in so much pain I am crying. It’s because of the pounding, she says. These are not the soft soil trails of the forest. Everything is rock.

She is where I would like to be. I do not mean that she is there. I mean that she is this thing: a sun-warmed rock next to a rushing stream—a rejuvenating combination of sunlight, stone, and water. When I travel, I seek out these things. Likewise, she is where my mind goes when it decides to wander.

CONSTANT THOUGHT about the object of desire is a common sign of romantic love, as are a need for proximity and physical contact, despair at separation, elation when the object of desire gives you attention, and a tremendous awareness and understanding of the partner’s moods. But in the article “What Does Sexual Orientation Orient?” Lisa Diamond points out that these feelings and behaviors also characterize the infant-caregiver bond. And who has not heard a new mother comment that she is totally “in love” with her child? Although we may not remember it, we were in love with our parents, too, during the first year or so of our lives.

The mistake most of us make is to assume romantic love evolved to ensure that mammalian mothers and fathers stuck together to raise their highly dependent young and, thus, that it occurs in concert with sexual desire, and is only legitimate when directed toward the opposite sex. But it’s likely that romantic love between adults is what’s known as an exaptation, a trait evolved for one reason but co-opted for something else. Here’s why: from an evolutionary standpoint, long before there was “mating for life” there was the necessity for a mother to bond with her child—creating a totally physical, totally loving, but totally asexual relationship between her and either a daughter or son. The point here, as Lisa Diamond puts it, is that “romantic love and sexual desire are functionally independent,” and “love knows no gender.” In fact, humans may be biologically predisposed to experience romantic friendship.

THE UNIVERSITY OF OREGON website that divided humanity into two undeniable (but unstated) groups gave this definition for metamorphism: rocks that have “moved into an environment in which the minerals which make up the rock become unstable and out of equilibrium with the new environmental conditions.” So metamorphism is situation-dependent. It’s the process of adjusting to some kind of change, usually caused by increased temperature or pressure. Above 200 degrees Celsius (392 degrees Fahrenheit) rocks begin to recrystallize. Whatever elements are available in the original rock will be broken down and recombined in a different way, creating new minerals.

If temperatures reach 600 degrees Celsius, a complete meltdown occurs: rocks become magma, which, when it cools, creates igneous rocks, something entirely new. But during metamorphism, nothing is lost or added at the elemental level. The basic composition stays the same, which is what is so complex about it: that the rock can still be what it is and yet be in the process of becoming something slightly different. What I don’t get about metamorphism, that the metamorphism takes place while the rocks are in a solid state, is also perhaps what is so groundbreaking about new theories one human sexuality: according to Lisa Diamond, it is possible for a person’s sexual desire to change in the context of a single relationship while that person’s sexual orientation remains the same.

Diamond has coined the phrase “sexual fluidity” to describe this phenomenon. In her book by that name, Diamond addresses how most people believe that the biological order of a romantic relationship entails sexual desire first (that initial “chemistry”) and romantic love (the intimate bond) second. But, Diamond’s research shows, the opposite can also be true, especially for women. What begins as an intimate friendship can turn sexual. Different from bisexuality, which involves regular attraction to both sexes, sexual fluidity might happen only once in a lifetime, or only a few times, or not at all. The likely catalyst is oxytocin, a hormone that facilitates not only bonding between infants and caregivers (or close friends), but also sexual arousability. Simply hanging out with someone for whom you care deeply can—sometimes and for some women—produce desires that conflict with a person’s primary sexual orientation. In other words, the body’s chemistry can temporarily change its own seemingly fixed tendencies. When this happens, the world may call you something different. But you are still you.

IF YOU SEARCH Elizabeth Mavor’s biography of the Ladies of Llangollen, or the diaries of the ladies themselves, you won’t find a single hint of anything sexual. And neither will you here. All I can say is this: there is no field guide for love, or friendship, or the great variety of people one will encounter in a lifetime. And: this is not a coming out piece. It is about going inward.

One Christmas, we go with our husbands to Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, France. I want to see the engravings of early man, something inconceivably old. I arrange a visit to the Grotte de Bara-Bahau—an onomatopoeic name, given for the sound the large rocks that have fallen inside the cave must have made. We listen to a woman give a brief tour to just the four of us, in broken English. We strain to see in the rock the living things she traces with her laser pointer: a reindeer, a horse without legs and a horse without a head, and aurochs—an early ancestor of cattle. The bear is a bit easier: natural convexities in the cave wall itself form its head and shoulders, a large flint pebble acts as eye, and from its mouth is etched a long line, representing the animal’s breath. Easier still is the phallus, which my friend points out privately to her husband before the guide even gets to it, not sure if it is an actual engraving or an instance of pareidolia—the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist, like seeing a picture in the clouds. “Oh, yes,” the guide chimes in, overhearing. “There is a phallus.” This is rather rare; more common are depictions of female genitalia, I later read.

We leave the cave, joking like teenagers about my friend’s singlehanded ability to identify the phallus in a cave of otherwise obscure engravings, but also about the strange question our guide repeated over and over during the tour, singling out each one of us, multiple times, as its recipient. “Do you know?” she would ask, the intonation and pronunciation of her mother tongue adding mystique to her inquiry. Then she would turn to the next one of us, making direct eye contact: “Do you know?”

“I do not know,” she would respond to her own question. She seemed to want to preserve, in addition to the engravings, some other element of the cave’s mystery.

ON THE SHORE of Lake Superior, among those wave-carved potholes filled with stones, I looked in, chose the ones I liked, and held them close. But just as the page on beach junk in my field guide suggested, I also found something in one of those potholes that I didn’t expect. When my husband accidentally dropped a coveted quartz pebble into the largest and deepest of the holes, I rolled up my shirt sleeve as far as it would go and leaned over to recover the stone. Suddenly, I saw myself.

It must have been similar to what Narcissus experienced in that silvery-surfaced forest pond. Never before had I seen a clearer picture than what I saw that day in the pothole. I couldn’t move. Like Narcissus, all I could do was gaze. Perhaps what kept Narcissus at the pool, in admiration over what was before him, was not self-love but a fascination with the image of himself as reflected by the earth. What I saw in that pothole, now a portal, was not made of skin and bone—the usual “junk”—brown hair, brown eyes, small ears, my father’s nose. I was made of water and stone. Though we may label ourselves heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, lovers, or just friends, we should not be surprised to find that we are as dynamic as the earth that holds us up. We are simultaneously solid and fluid, inherently uncategorizable. We are always in the process of transformation.

Originally, life on earth was divided into two kingdoms: plants and animals. Then there were three; then four; then five; now six. Perhaps two categories—whatever they may be—are not sufficient for humans either. Names that come from without are destined to be inaccurate. It is not what we are called that we must answer to, but what calls us from within.

THE FLIGHT FROM KUWAIT CITY was overbooked, and the American soldiers standing near the gate were hoping for upgrades. They were comparing notes with an accountant returning from her first trip to the region, keeping an eye on a man in a dishdasha, who paced in front of the empty counter, waiting for a chance to resume his tirade against United. He claimed that on the flight from Manama a drunken American had tried to open the emergency exit; nothing the gate agents said during the layover assuaged him, and now they were gone. Sometimes, inexplicably, he would drag his backpack across the floor, muttering loudly, in Arabic and English, about the perfidy of Americans. When two security officials came to take him away, the soldiers assured the accountant that he would not be allowed to board the plane to Dulles.

I had not noticed any irregularities on the first leg of my journey, perhaps because I was writing notes about my cultural diplomacy mission to Bahrain—a series of encounters, lectures, and creative-writing workshops organized by the American embassy for the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, which brought me face to face with artists, students, and writers from the divided Shia and Sunni communities. The Arab Spring had left scores dead on this small island, and the Shia’s continuing protests against the American-backed Sunni monarchy suggested that more violence was in the offing. This dark knowledge informed the impressions that I recorded in my notebook, the last of which concerned the ancient fortress in Manama, Qal’at al-Bahrain, a tel containing in its sands layers of history and myth, from the epic of Gilgamesh and annals of Alexander the Great to the oil rush of our time.

Walking by the seawall, toward a palm grove, I was struck by the number of blank spaces in the archaeological record (three-quarters of this UNESCO World Heritage site remains unexcavated) and by the mysterious fact that Bahrain once possessed the largest cemetery in Arabia. In the museum was a display of ceramic bowls in which skeletons of sea snakes were coiled one on top of another. Archaeologists surmise that the tradition of snake sacrifice was the gift of traders from India, one of a succession of civilizations to leave a mark—Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek, Arab, Persian, Portuguese, British—a history of exchange in which the United States has assumed the leading military role. The navy’s Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, is responsible for the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and parts of the Indian Ocean, protecting shipping in the Suez Canal and the passage of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. Bahrain is but a proxy in the regional struggle for power. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States are all vying for influence here.

Which is fitting. The economic boom in the Gulf began in 1932 with the discovery of oil in Bahrain—the prelude to the rise of petro-states, OPEC, and Western efforts to ensure a steady supply of petroleum and natural gas. Perhaps it will end here, too. Bahrain’s reserves will likely run dry before 2030; with discoveries of oil in Brazil and Kenya and Mozambique, as well as the transformation of North America into an energy power through the development of natural gas fields in the United States and the shale oil industry in Canada, the strategic importance of the region may diminish. But this is still a rough neighborhood—marked by the Arab Spring, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program—which will continue to consume a disproportionate amount of diplomatic, political, and military energy.

It was after midnight when we boarded the plane. The Special Forces officer beside me was grateful to have an aisle seat: he had injured his back in a Black Hawk helicopter crash, and expected to get up often during the flight to stretch. He looked like an aging beach bum, with a blond ponytail and tan—he planned to spend his time off windsurfing on the Potomac—and he couldn’t wait to return to Afghanistan; thirty years of service had not diminished his zeal for his work. Turn and burn, he said of his multiple deployments, a useful description of how the post-9/11 American military has operated, in perpetual war, with a budget greater than the combined military spending of the rest of the world. This is unsustainable in the ongoing economic crisis, and the officer knew that change was coming. But he thought that there would always be a place for warriors with his particular skill set, on which he did not care to elaborate. He wondered why the plane was so full. He had heard something about a conference in Kuwait City. The date was December 14, 2011. What would not emerge until late the next night was that while we were in the air the last American troops in Iraq were preparing to leave their base, under cover of darkness so as not to attract insurgent fire, and travel overland to the border with Kuwait, where CNN was waiting to record the end of the occupation. We were all heading home.

THE GREEN FLEET

It is a truism that generals fight the last war, sometimes to their detriment, relying on strategies and tactics unsuited to a different battlefield. With the departure of American forces from Iraq and their impending withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014, military planners sketching out future campaigns must take into account successes and failures in the war on terror, mindful that the next theater of operations may require new ways of thinking about the mission. War is a constant in human history, and military leaders are judged by their ability to assess gathering threats, which now include climate change, and prepare accordingly. Melting glaciers and ice caps, rising seas and incidences of severe weather, drought and wildfire—these must be factored into calculations about everything from terrain to weather to the length of supply lines.

As the Arctic sea ice shrinks, for example, and it becomes easier to extract the reserves of oil, natural gas, and minerals thought to lie under the ocean floor, competition for these resources will increase the likelihood of friction between governments with claims on this region. What was once unimaginable may one day seem inevitable: U.S. forces preparing for war not only against a traditional foe like Russia, but longstanding allies like Canada, Denmark, and Norway.

How the Pentagon will respond to future threats can be gleaned from its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the most recent edition of which appeared in 2010. Like the insurance industry, the military recognizes that it cannot afford the luxury of remaining skeptical about climate change, the effects of which, the QDR notes, “are already being observed in every region of the world, including the United States and its coastal waters.” The military is thus “developing policies and plans to manage the effects of climate change on its operating environment, missions, and facilities.” This includes performing environmental stewardship at installations in this country, in the service of meeting “resource efficiency and sustainability goals.”

It may be comforting to learn that the Pentagon is determined to adapt to climate change and to reduce its dependence on oil—a policy initiated during the Bush administration, by then–secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, who said that a more efficient fighting machine could be built if it did not have to rely on oil from the Middle East. The logistics and security costs of transporting fuel to a battlefield can raise the price per gallon to $600; hence, for economic and security reasons, the Pentagon is exploring various alternative energy sources, from solar panels in Afghanistan to biofuels in fighter jets and ships.

Enter the Great Green Fleet (after President Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, which a century ago announced the arrival of a new maritime power), a carrier strike group to be deployed by 2016, with biofuels powering its non-nuclear vessels. In recent military exercises in the Pacific Ocean, FA-18 Super Hornets using a mixture of jet fuel, cooking grease, and algae took off from the deck of the USS Nimitz, while two destroyers and a guided-missile cruiser sailed nearby, powered by a mixture of bio- and conventional fuels.

“There was no difference with the fuel,” said Ray Mabus, secretary of the navy, insisting that the exercise offered proof that biofuels can work in an operational environment.

While some critics object to the high cost of biofuels, Mabus insists that these costs will decrease as demand rises. Within the decade, the air force and navy will replace half of their petroleum needs with biofuels, and Mabus draws on the navy’s history of innovation—from sail to coal to oil to nuclear power—to argue that “at the time of each energy transformation, there were doubters and naysayers who said trading a known source of energy for an unknown one was too risky and too costly. But the navy pursued innovation because it improved the capability of the fleet and made us better war fighters.”

Nor should we overlook the fact that the Pentagon, which is responsible for 90 percent of the fuel used by the federal government ($16 billion in 2008), is a giant engine for economic growth. (Think: the internet, GPS, flat-screen televisions.) If the secretary of the navy is correct, the Great Green Fleet will become an emblem of a more sustainable future.

But this is only part of the story, as the QDR makes clear:

A series of powerful cross-cutting trends, made more complex by the ongoing economic crisis, threatens to complicate international relations and make the exercise of U.S. statecraft more difficult. The rising demand for resources, rapid urbanization of littoral regions, the effects of climate change, the emergence of new strains of disease, and profound cultural and demographic tensions in several regions are just some of the trends whose complex interplay may spark or exacerbate future conflicts.

Strategists have long recognized the connection between environmental stress and war. According to Michael Klare, an authority on the subject, “While many academics and politicians cling to the ‘clash of civilizations’ paradigm to explain world affairs, those who have been watching developments closely recognize that ethnic and religious schisms are often caused or worsened by competition over scarce supplies of land, food, and water.” Such competition will deepen as the climate warms, causing floods in some areas and drought in others. Rich croplands will become deltas or deserts: fertile conditions for extremists avid to exploit hunger and misery for their own purposes. This will likely lead to more conflicts, more calls for military intervention, more humanitarian and disaster-relief missions. The Pentagon must also plan for hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, and the flooding of its installations and training grounds. No fleet or army on earth will be able to manage all the problems that the changing climate will bring.

THE UNTHINKABLE

Soon after 9/11, in a seminar on lessons of the tragedy, an intelligence professional lamented the inability to synthesize information when the attack was looming—to connect the dots. After the seminar, I told her that I live in a place, Iowa City, known for cultivating the art of drawing connections, which we call teaching creative writing. She said that such thinking might avert further tragedies—an idea that inspired my call to a man with long experience in the field of preparing for the worst. William Smullen, director of the National Security Studies Program at Syracuse University and former chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell, convenes a two-week seminar every spring for military and civilian leaders to assess security challenges, provide strategic insights, and plan for the future. I asked him what most worries him.

“The threats are everywhere,” he said. “What keeps me awake at night is the thought that someone will get their hands on a WMD—biological, chemical, radiological—and set it off.

“The Cold War was easy,” he continued. “Now our forces are worn out, and there’s so much uncertainty in the world that no one can predict what kinds of wars we’ll wage in the future. We’ve been guilty of a lack of imagination, of an inability to think outside the box about what might happen. We have to think the unthinkable, in view of the fact that in the last ten years we’ve gone from being able to fight two regional contingency wars to one. By 2017 we’ll have a much smaller military. And the next wars will be insurgencies.”

He paused to reflect. Thirty years in the military, including two tours of duty in Vietnam and service as spokesman at the Pentagon, had taught him to choose his words carefully.

“Will another 9/11 happen?” he asked. “There are people out there trying to bring another catastrophic event to our soil. For instance, they’d love to start forest fires in California, Arizona, Idaho—all over the West. You can create a big fire very, very fast. I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but we’re in a very complex period. The fact that nothing like 9/11 has happened since may lull us into believing there’s nothing to worry about.”

EVERYONE CAN DRONE

It is a short distance from the forward operating base in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, to its adjacent airfield. But the security situation is so dire that Apache helicopters must ferry soldiers, diplomats, and aid officials back and forth across the road, convoys of mine-resistant armored personnel carriers being too expensive to organize. Our longest war is ending not with a whimper but with suicide bombings, often detonated by Afghan troops operating alongside Americans.

One winter morning, a diplomat and I boarded a helicopter for the five-minute flight and then took a bus to the edge of the runway, where we waited in our body armor at a red light, as if at a crosswalk. The diplomat was anxious about making our flight to Kabul, and as she studied a plane parked in the holding area across the way, debating whether it was ours, a Predator drone taxied past us and took off toward the mountains dividing Afghanistan from Pakistan. The light turned green, we lumbered across the tarmac, and a contractor met us at the foot of the stairs to the plane in the holding area. We were not on his flight manifest, so we waited for another plane, which eventually took us to Kabul. At dinner that night in the embassy, I mentioned to another diplomat that I had seen a drone take off toward Pakistan. “No, you didn’t,” she said.

This underscores the moral dilemma of waging war with unmanned aerial vehicles. It’s no secret that during the Obama administration the number of drone strikes has dramatically increased in preparation for the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan; while some voices have been raised in protest it has become clear that the information revolution has outpaced our ethical response, which is traditionally articulated by philosophers, theologians, and writers. We lack a language adequate to the expansion of surveillance, development of cyberwarfare, and deployment of drones. (How, for example, to make sense of the phrase collateral damage, which has become a commonplace of foreign policy discourse?) In an article from the New York Times, “The Moral Hazard of Drones,” the scholars John Kaag and Sarah Kreps remind us that

the creation of technology is a value-laden enterprise. It creates the material conditions of culture and society and therefore its creation should be regarded as always already moral and political in nature. However, technology itself (the physical stuff of robotic warfare) is neither smart nor dumb, moral nor immoral. It can be used more or less precisely, but precision and efficiency are not inherently morally good. Imagine a very skilled dentist who painlessly removes the wrong tooth. Imagine a drone equipped with a precision guided munition that kills a completely innocent person, but spares the people who live in his or her neighborhood. The use of impressive technologies does not grant one impressive moral insight.

Their warning should apply to anyone adapting military technologies for other purposes, including preservation of the environment: the most benign use of drones will not change what lies in the hearts of humans. Now everyone can drone! So reads the banner on http://www.ConservationDrones.org, which offers to share its knowledge about building low-cost drones “to help conservation workers and researchers in developing countries do their jobs a lot more effectively and cost efficiently.” The skies are rapidly filling with drones, which will surely serve every imaginable purpose under the moon and stars, from patrolling borders to monitoring loss of habitat to tracking poachers to advertising to, well, you name it.

The sight of that drone was on my mind when I went to the Friday market at the NATO base in Kabul. At lunchtime, soldiers, diplomats, and aid officials barter with local merchants for carpets, lapis lazuli, and relics of the Soviet order (medals, hats), and there I found a small clay bomb for sale, which dated from the Crimean War—a useful reminder that in this graveyard of empires there are certain constants: borders are drawn in blood; no one likes an occupying army; the battle for resources never ends. A hundred years from now, in a bazaar in Kabul, a traveler may find a drone that fits inside his hand and conclude that nothing has changed.

THE COOPERATIVE SPIRIT

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was in Hanoi, working out a new security arrangement with the Vietnamese military, on the day that our delegation of American writers arrived for a cultural exchange. What surprised me was the tangle of emotions that I experienced—sadness, regret, and exhilaration—at the energy on display in the capital of our former enemy. I grew up watching the carnage of the Vietnam War on television, which touched me only on occasion: when my baseball coach’s nephew was killed; when a Fourth of July parade ended with a protest; when a faux award ceremony was held during my freshman year of high school for the star football player who won the pool for receiving the lowest number in the lottery for the draft.

“I’d like to thank my classmates for this honor,” he said in his acceptance speech, “and Richard Nixon for prolonging the war, and my right knee for making me 4F.”

The suspension of the draft the next year sealed over that moment in history for me, and now a seam opened in my memory, widening by the minute—in our creative writing workshops; in a tea house with an aging Vietnamese novelist; at an exhibit of poster art from the war, with captions like Nixon has to pay with blood for our blood and Uncle Ho is still marching with us.

Our cultural diplomacy mission was part of the Obama administration’s strategic pivot toward Asia in reaction to China’s rising power—a soft-power counterpoint, if you will, to the small expeditionary force of marines recently deployed to Australia. Competition over access to minerals and oil, disagreements at the United Nations and other forums over security and trade issues, confrontations at sea between China and Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, and Vietnam—all carry the seeds of war. Our efforts to win the hearts and minds of Vietnamese literati, matched by our Chinese counterparts, belonged to that elusive realm of influence, strategic and cultural, which artists map at their peril. The genial officiousness of the apparatchiks accompanying us from the Vietnamese Writers’ Union, who had arranged our program, brought to mind apparatchiks from the Chinese Writers’ Association who had taken me and other American writers around their country. But if it was easier for Vietnamese writers to relate to Chinese writers they did not let on: it was in their interest as much as ours to find common ground in the face of China’s rising power.

For the fate of the earth is in profound ways being written in China, between its demand for natural resources and respect for the environment. “I sense that Chinese leaders are unsure of how to proceed on these critical issues,” Michael Klare explains. “On one hand, they favor energy efficiency and the development of green innovations; on the other hand, they show no inclination to soften their drive to gain control over all those islands in the East and South China Seas. This in turn is provoking increased opposition from neighboring countries, including key U.S. allies like Japan and the Philippines—thereby increasing the risk of a naval clash as the U.S. becomes more entrenched in the area as part of Obama’s ‘pivot’ strategy.”

On our last night in Hanoi the Writers’ Union hosted a dinner for us at a local restaurant, presided over by a former tank commander and two of his fellow soldiers, who joked about how easy it had been to kill Americans—how sorry they felt for them. Yet for all their bluster about winning the war they betrayed some insecurity, questioning me at length about the International Writing Program’s supposed preference for hosting South Vietnamese writers. I explained again (the question had been raised in many settings) that in my program North Vietnamese writers far outnumbered writers from the South. My hosts did not believe me, the dinner ended on a strained note, and when the Americans headed for the Old Quarter to shop, I decided to go for a walk around the lake, where couples were dancing to music blaring from boomboxes.

“The written history of the world is largely a history of warfare,” John Keegan writes in A History of Warfare, “because the states within which we live came into existence largely through conquest, civil strife or struggles for independence. The great statesmen of written history, moreover, have generally been men of violence for, if not warriors themselves, though many were, they understood the use of violence and did not shrink to use it for their ends.” He goes on to suggest that even though “the frequency and intensity of warmaking” in the twentieth century touched the majority of families in Europe, America, Russia, and China, the fact remains that “in their everyday lives, people know little of violence or even of cruelty or harsh feeling. It is the spirit of cooperativeness, not confrontation, that makes the world go round.”

This insight struck me when A History of Warfare was published in 1993. I was reporting on the siege of Sarajevo, the longest in modern history, where neighbors had turned against their neighbors and everywhere I looked was evidence to contradict Keegan. There was no gas, water, and electricity in the city that had just hosted the Winter Olympics; the only way to communicate with the outside world was by satellite phone or fax; civilians, especially children, seemed to be always in the sights of snipers and artillerymen. Yet Bosnians carried on with their daily lives, and for all the carnage and destruction, I nevertheless witnessed more acts of cooperation than of aggression, which convinced me of the essential wisdom of Keegan’s proposition.

Twenty years later, I still think he was right, although I am also haunted by a story that a soldier told me last winter in Kabul, which points to the strangeness of war in a wired world—the strangeness, that is, at the heart of the human condition, which from time immemorial has led us into battle. One day the soldier was walking around the base, arguing with his girlfriend on his iPhone, when the Taliban launched an attack—mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, small arms fire. He took cover behind an armored vehicle, still arguing with her, and he was trying to gauge the origin of the attack when she told him to hang up—which he refused to do. A shell whistled overhead, another landed just beyond him. Finally she said, What’s the matter with you?

Join us for a live call-in discussion about the future of war with Christopher Merrill and other special guests on June 18. Learn more at http://www.orionmagazine.org/discuss.

ON A WARM DAY in March 2011, I find myself in the back seat of a white, government-issue Chevy Suburban, rolling over spongy pasturelands in the sparsely populated foothills of the Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri. The vehicle is being piloted by Brian Ward, a geodetic advisor for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Dave Doyle, the chief surveyor with NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey division, sits in the passenger seat, looking intently at a dashboard-mounted GPS screen. “Almost there. Just a little farther on,” Doyle mutters as Ward slaloms through an agitated herd of beef cattle.

We are aimed at the mean population center—or centroid—of the United States, a hypothetical and highly mathematical point calculated every ten years as part of the decennial census. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population center is “the place where an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly if all 308,745,538 residents counted in the 2010 Census were of identical weight.” Picture that if you can.

“Looks like we continue on and then veer left,” says Doyle, a gregarious man with a mane of salt-and-pepper hair, glasses resting precariously at the tip of his nose. The edge of the pasture gives way to a stand of leafless hickories and dogwoods covered in white blooms. Due to the unusually warm weather, the small, four-petaled flowers have emerged a few weeks earlier than usual.

Our progress blocked by a high fence, we hop out of the truck and assemble. Before setting out into the woods, I punch the following coordinates into my hand-held GPS unit: 37°31´03˝ N, 92°10´23˝ W. From a manila folder, Doyle produces a satellite image of the area. A small digital thumbtack denoting the center pokes into a stand of trees on the opposite side of a small stream—the only barrier between us and the balance point of the American population.

SINCE THE FIRST DECENNIAL CENSUS in 1790, the center of population has moved roughly 870 miles southwest, from a point near Baltimore to a tiny hamlet in central Missouri at the fringe of the Mark Twain National Forest. The movement of the center is driven by regional population growth. It’s pushed and pulled by a kind of urban magnetism: the larger the population of a city or town, the greater the tug.

To trace the path of the centroid is to skim a great narrative spanning 220 years. That narrative is the nation’s history of growth, with each point along the way emerging as a sort of chapter: the rise of industrialism in the Northeast, the expansion of the western frontier, the waves of European, Latin American, and Asian immigration, the post–World War II population boom.

In its migration, only twice has the center of population come to rest in an actual population center: Baltimore, Maryland (population center, 1800), and Covington, Kentucky (population center, 1880, and hometown of a fourth-grade-dropout named Haven Gillespie, who penned numerous classic American songs including “Drifting and Dreaming” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”). Over the years, the centroid has been found in places like Clarksburg, West Virginia, population center of 1840, where today the FBI operates its National Instant Criminal Background Check System to screen purchasers of firearms. Its path also passes through Portsmouth, Ohio, childhood home of Roy Rogers, which held the distinction in 1870. Portsmouth lost its NFL team to Detroit in 1933, its steel mills in the 1980s, and more than half its population of forty thousand between 1950 and 2000. And let us not forget Olney, Illinois, which held the honor in 1950. Hemmed in between industrial-scale farms, the town of ninety-one hundred is perhaps best known for its population of indigenous albino squirrels (penalty $500 for running one over), whose habitat is restricted almost entirely to a single city park.

A great series of advances and contractions, the movement of the American population has been diffuse and complex, a mass peopling counteracted by catastrophic bouts of depopulation. It’s difficult to imagine that a single measure could ever come close to summarizing the process, let alone reduce it to a single, floating point. And yet, here you have it.

In 1790, the first decennial census plotted the center of population in Kent County, Maryland, some twenty-three miles east of Baltimore. It was just two years after the ratification of the Constitution, and the U.S. population was concentrated along the Eastern Seaboard in the port cities of Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Charleston. New York, with a population of a little more than thirty-three thousand, was the nation’s largest city—and has remained so ever since. It’s hard to imagine, however, that Marblehead—today a quaint and touristic village a half-hour north of Boston—was then the nation’s tenth largest city, with a population of just under six thousand.

For the next hundred years, the centroid moved steadily westward, oscillating between the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth parallels, over the Appalachian highlands of West Virginia and into the rolling pasturelands of southern Ohio and Indiana. As the population fanned west, further weighting the lands on the nation’s left half, the center was duly lured in its wake. Some sought economic opportunity or self-reinvention in western cities. Some went in search of gold in the Sierra or silver in the Rockies. Others were motivated by the promise of land and self-determination in giveaways such as the 1862 Homestead Act. These new migrants were granted 160-acre parcels (later increased to 320 acres in the “enlarged” Homestead Act of 1909) west of the Mississippi River. Many, however, found themselves suddenly thrust into a life of toil and servitude to the land itself as they clawed out a living from the arid and soon to be denuded reaches of the Great Plains west of the hundredth meridian.

Between 1910 and 1930, the center did something it had never done before or since. It remained virtually still. It’s not that population ceased to grow or that it stopped expanding. But the steady westward migration was counteracted by the mass immigration of millions of Europeans to the East Coast between 1890 and 1930, spurring draconian immigration laws such as the National Origins Act.

By 1930, the center was on the move again. But instead of continuing on its decisive westerly path it bent southward. That deflection, a trend that has continued to the present, was touched off by the great Texas oil booms, the rise of manufacturing in southern states, New Deal infrastructure projects including the great water-storage and hydroelectric projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority and Bureau of Reclamation, and the construction of permanent military bases in the South and West during and after World War II.

But arguably, the most influential factor in this change of course is air conditioning. That the centroid is headed, of all directions, southward, is a testament to our ability to blithely overpower climate with the brute force of fossil fuel. According to the 2010 Census, the Sunbelt cities of Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix, San Diego, San Antonio, and Dallas now comprise six of the country’s ten largest cities. Over the last decade, the population of southern states has increased by around 14 percent, the fastest growth of any region in the country, outpacing the national growth rate of nearly 10 percent.

In the same period, Americans have abandoned the farm and village for the urban tarmac and suburban lawn. Industrialized agriculture and its attendant degradation of soils and depletion of ancient aquifers have triggered a steady exodus from the Great Plains. The emptying has wracked not merely Plains communities but all of rural America. In 1900, the United States was 60 percent rural; today it is 19 percent. Many counties that once lay along the edge of the frontier have been extensively depopulated and now hover near, or even below, their prefrontier population levels.

WITH A DAY TO SPARE before meeting Doyle and his group of centroid-chasing geodesists, I head east through tentacles of tract homes and onto a table-flat grid of farms and fields to the town of Centralia, Illinois—population center of 1960 (38°35´58˝ N, 89°12´35˝ W). Established in 1853 at the intersection of the two main branches of the Illinois Central Railroad, Centralia is today a place of sprawling parks and faded farms, of sturdy brick homes, whitewashed wood bungalows, and trailers in colorful states of disrepair. In the northern reaches of town, on East Rexford Street, men in slacks and ties and women in floral print dresses mingle in the street outside the New Covenant Church, which inhabits a weathered steel Quonset hut.

In the town center, the stone pillar of the Centralia Carillon—a 160-foot-high bell tower—reaches toward the blue sky, looming over the low buildings and the ubiquitous flashing arrow billboards, many of which bear the phrase GO ORPHANS. The Orphans, I soon learn, are the local boys, high school basketball team, which has just advanced to the state tournament. (According to a sign at the edge of town, the Orphans are also “The Winningest Boys Basketball Team In The Nation.”)

On the outskirts of town, pump jacks plunge into fields beside a series of ponds, their surfaces rendered a luminous green by a film of eutrophic algae. The croaking of bullfrogs offers a faintly melodic counterpoint to the rhythmic clanging of metal and whirring of gears, and I’m tempted to leave my car parked on the side of the road and investigate the raspy calls, until I note a sign explaining that the marsh is actually part of a massive municipal sewage lagoon system.

Wandering Centralia’s hushed streets, I find resident Cindy Snyder outside St. Mary’s Catholic Church, speaking with three members of her congregation after Sunday services. I approach and explain my search for the plaque commemorating the 1960 center. Snyder says she knows of the designation but not where the marker is set. I show her some images I’ve gathered from a 1961 issue of Life magazine. One depicts a crowd assembled in a field holding placards with messages such as FRONT AND CENTER, CENTER OF ATTRACTION, and HEART OF THE U.S.A. emblazoned across them.

Snyder takes the images in hand, holding them close, squinting for small clues. “It’s hard to say,” she says. The weathered triangle of a wood barn and the stark white cylinder of a silo are the only defining features. Snyder says many surrounding plots like this have been built over with houses or bought up by large factory farms and the agribusiness goliath Monsanto, which operates a fortresslike facility south of town where its patented Roundup Ready soybeans are bagged and stored. It’s not just the family farms that have disappeared, Snyder says, but the small family-run businesses along Broadway, the town’s main drag, and even the young families themselves, who have gone in pursuit of jobs and larger, newer homes in the suburbs of St. Louis, Chicago, and Indianapolis.

Before leaving, I decide to visit the site of one of the town’s most significant and harrowing historic events: the No. 5 Coal Mine disaster of 1947 (not to be confused with the infamous coal mine fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania, remnants of which still burn today, fifty years later). On a March day, 142 miners descended 540 feet into the DuQuoin monocline, a formation rich in bituminous coal. On an average day, the men who worked the No. 5 seam hauled two thousand tons of coal up from the depths. Much of that coal was sent to the steel mills and automobile plants of the Midwest, fueling the manufacture of the Fords, Chevrolets, and Chryslers that carried the population out of the centers of cities, along the asphalt trails of new highways, and into tract housing developments in the nation’s rapidly expanding suburbs.

On March 25, however, something went terribly wrong at Centralia No. 5. Life magazine described it as a “soft, puffing explosion” deep underground. The fire began when tiny particles of coal dust ignited after an errant charge was detonated in the depths. Of the 142 miners who went down that day, 111 were killed by fire and “afterdamp,” toxic gases that remained in the depths after the explosion. Woody Guthrie’s song “The Dying Miner” memorializes the miners, and depicts their harrowing final moments:

My eyes are blinded with fumes,
But it sounds like the men are all gone,
’Cept Joe Valentini, Fred Gussler and George,
Trapped down in this hellhole of fire.

I found a small plaque commemorating the men of Centralia No. 5 in an empty city park in the neighboring town of Wamac, surrounded by brightly painted playground equipment and creaking pump jacks. I never did find the disc marking the 1960 center of population.

IN THIS AGE of geosynchronous satellites and fully integrated global positioning systems, Dave Doyle is accustomed to plotting positions with accuracies to the nearest centimeter. Having joined NOAA’s geodetic division in the early 1970s, he has either participated in or overseen these population center surveys since the 1980 Census. He was first introduced to the idea of the centroid when his boss and mentor handed him a large manila folder with the word centers hand-scrawled across it. “He was passing the torch on to me,” he says.

The folder is stuffed with an array of yellowing papers, many of which are letters from private citizens looking for midpoints of states, counties, and townships. “When I first saw this, I thought, What is going on here? Why do people care about any of this?” says Doyle. But in his thirty-plus years on the trail of the centroid, he has come to embrace the idea. “People want to know where they are on the surface of the earth,” he explains. “They want to know where they stand.”

For most of human history, centers have been the province of myth. Mircea Eliade, the late historian of religion at the University of Chicago and author of The Sacred and the Profane, charted a set of ancient centers. He called these axes mundi, or “world pillars.” The axis mundi, he wrote, “connects and supports heaven and earth,” while its base “is fixed in the world below.” David Adams Leeming, in his book Creation Myths of the World, notes that mountains, trees, stones, and other prominent natural landmarks often stand at these sacred midpoints. “Centers are always powerful,” wrote Boston University professor of religion and anthropology Frank J. Korom, “because they constitute a point of intersection between the three regions: heaven, earth, hell.”

Centers imply gravity, a force of social cohesion. The Great Oak of Southern California’s Luiseño tribe, for instance, marks their sacred center point and is believed to grow from the ashes of Wiyot, their ancestral hero. The sipapu, center of the Hopi people, is a travertine spring at the bottom of the Little Colorado River canyon where their ancestors are said to have emerged from underground into this world. The omphalos, the navel of the world, a beehive-shaped structure said to allow communication with the gods, sat at Delphi, the heart of the ancient Greek world, and served as a nexus between the natural and supernatural. The Irminsul, sacred center of the Saxons, is supposed to have been a pedestal or holy tree. Some historians have noted clear similarities between the Irminsul and the Yggdrasil, the great mythical ash of Norse mythology, whose roots were believed to anchor the earth to the heavens.

Once enshrined within a culture, the idea of a sacred center is difficult to erase. During Charlemagne’s eighth-century campaign to subdue and unify the tribes of Saxony and bring them under the rule of the Holy Roman Empire, one of his first decrees was to destroy the Irminsul. Nearly one thousand years later, during the great nineteenth-century revival of Germanic folklore, Jacob Grimm pinpointed the lost location of the Irminsul to “15 miles from the town of Obermarsberg in the Teutoburg Forest.”

Not surprisingly, maps have been critical in visualizing these sacred centers. The eighth-century Beatine Map (also known as the “T and O,” or orbis terrarium, map) is a simple plot that places Jerusalem at the axis of three continents—Asia, Africa, and Europe—and the center of the medieval world. And Jewish scripture says, “As the navel is set in the center of the human body, / So is Israel in the center of the world.”

But Israel itself is a land of multiple centers. The holy city of Jerusalem radiates outward from the Foundation Stone, with its sipapu-like aperture known among the faithful as the Well of Souls. The Samaritans, a Judaic sect, established their own holy center point at Mount Gerizim near the West Bank city of Nablus. Muslims plot their center within a center at the Grand Mosque at Mecca. Affixed to the Kaaba (the cube-shaped shrine believed by Muslims to be situated at the center of the world) is the holy Black Stone, itself set inside a circular hollow within an ornate silver frame.

These midpoints have remained sacrosanct—and in place—for centuries. But here in the United States, there is no omphalos, no Kaaba or Foundation Stone—there is only the open road unfurling. Our diverse population is busy moving, being born, and dying, changing careers and cities, pressing outward into the ever-expanding arms of suburbs and exurbs. The center never rests. Every time an elderly woman passes in Yuma, Arizona, or a child is born in Caribou, Maine, or a young couple pulls a U-Haul trailer onto a busy avenue in San Francisco, the axis shifts. Perhaps the author William Least Heat-Moon said it best when he told a crowd assembled in Lowell, Massachusetts, for the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, “I’ve always thought that the fifty stars on the flag should be replaced with fifty tires.”

AT AN INTERSECTION flanked by wide fields, a cemetery, and a gas station, Doyle locates an oxidized metal disc glinting in a nondescript patch of grass. Before we set out to find the 2010 center, he has led our group into the tiny hamlet of Edgar Springs, population center of 2000 (37°41´49˝ N, 91°48´34˝ W), roughly 110 miles southwest of St. Louis.

As we revolve around the marker, snapping pictures and surveying the surroundings, a large man emerges onto the front porch of a small wood-frame house next to the marker. He waves hello, a crow call and whistle attached to a string around his neck. His name is Junior Harris, and he grew up in Edgar Springs, population two hundred and change. “May I help you gentlemen?” he asks in a rich Ozark drawl. Doyle asks if he knows about the marker. He nods. “If I walk to the east side of my property the whole world shifts,” says Harris with a chuckle.

While the tide of Manifest Destiny was anything but glacial, some in these small towns, like Harris, have retained an intimate relationship with the local geography and a sense of the land before it was altered by progress. Harris describes the surrounding tracts of farmland and rattles off the names of the people to whom they belong. He knows where the power lines cut over the rolling ridges and where the water and sewage mains run. He knows the swamps, the woodlands, the remnant swaths of elk grass—a hallmark species of the tallgrass prairie that once grew so high and thick that, Harris says, “two men standing two feet apart wouldn’t know that they were standing right next to each other.”

Harris also knows that the marker beside his home is a mere placeholder. (He’s willing to admit this even though the small benchmark earned him the title “Mr. Middle America” in a Financial Times article a few years back.) He points to the woods beyond his property and tells us that the “real” 2000 centroid is located out there, three miles east of the ceremonial marker, near the spring where half a century ago his grandfather used to drive his cattle during the hot Missouri summers.

The decision to place the marker in accessible places, such as Harris’s front yard, is a practical one, says Doyle. The Census Bureau and NOAA want to position the center markers accurately—but not with such precision that the general public must cross private property or brave ticks, thorns, and poison ivy to find them. Of course the center of population cannot be beholden to such rules. Like a free-drifting balloon, it comes to rest where it will.

DOYLE AND HIS colleagues agree that the centroid will move a little farther south and west, maybe even slipping out of Missouri and nudging into northern Arkansas. There he thinks it will soon come to rest—the axis of a population at last in equilibrium.

But such predictions may take one critical factor for granted: a stable climate. Like the speedometer needle of a vehicle with a stuck accelerator, average temperatures continue to climb. In the last century, average temperatures across the continental U.S. have jumped by roughly one and a half degrees Fahrenheit, and the rate of overall warming has more than tripled since 1970. Moreover, the top ten warmest twelve-month periods on record in the U.S. all took place between 1999 and the present. A 2009 study from the United States Global Change Research Program predicts that the average temperature in the continental U.S. will increase by between four and eleven degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. The southern states are projected to see the most fearsome warming, with the number of days per year above ninety degrees jumping from 60 today to 150 by the end of the century.

In addition to unprecedented warming, the South has seen the bulk of the nation’s damaging weather—from droughts and hurricanes to floods and tornadoes. To visualize this pattern, one can view a color-coded map published by NOAA showing where the majority of billion-plus-dollar disasters have occurred during the last thirty years. The striking feature is that the states of the Southeast—North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas—are all rendered in shades of deep red, denoting a kind of statistical bull’s-eye of severe weather events.

While debate continues about the connection between warming temperatures and storm activity, the extreme weather thunders on. In October 2012, the European insurance firm Munich Re released a report stating that extreme weather events in North America had almost quintupled in the period between 1980 and 2011. In total, there were fourteen billion-dollar weather events in 2011 alone, the most ever recorded in a single year in the U.S. One storm in April spawned 343 individual tornadoes. But the year’s most destructive storm came in May, when an EF5 tornado cut a furrow through the town of Joplin, Missouri (150 miles southwest of the 2010 centroid), reducing neighborhoods to rubble and killing at least 160 people. In 2012, there were more than ten billion-dollar events, including the year’s most devastating, Hurricane Sandy.

There is also the threat of crippling aridity. By the end of the summer of 2012, more than 65 percent of the country was found to be in a state of “moderate to exceptional” drought, the highest percentage ever recorded in a twelve-month period. In parts of New Mexico and Colorado, vast stands of pinyon and juniper—no strangers to heat and dryness—have been perishing from a lethal cocktail of high temperatures and thirst, mottling dry mesas rust and brown. Jonathan Overpeck, a geosciences professor at the University of Arizona and IPCC author, has suggested that there is better than a one in ten chance that the Southwest may experience a crippling “megadrought” by 2100, the sort of event that has visited the region at least three times in the last two thousand years. Such a scenario could result in mass tree die-offs, colossal fires (like those that burned over 9 million acres last year alone), and a significant decrease in snowpack and water delivered to the Colorado River, a key source of drinking water for 30 million Americans living in the West.

Meanwhile, the northern tropics appear to be advancing toward the pole—by as much as eight degrees, according to some researchers. A report released in 2012 by scientists from the University of California, Riverside, speculates that this expansion is fueled by emissions from the industrialized world—as well as by soot from forest fires and wood-burning stoves in developing countries—and may trigger a corresponding advance of subtropical deserts.

A shift of a few degrees in the edges of the Sonoran or Mojave could nudge cities now at the margins of habitability into the midst of unconquerable deserts. What might such a scenario hold for cities such as Phoenix, Tucson, San Antonio, El Paso, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, and San Diego, places made habitable by great water engineering projects now threatened by prolonged drought? The human fallout is hard to imagine. But the capitulation of a string of large, southern cities would doubtlessly have a marked effect on the centroid.

THE OZARK MOUNTAINS spread to the blue horizon like concentric ripples thrown from a droplet hitting still water. We’ve left Junior Harris’s front lawn in Edgar Springs and are pressing southward, winding over Highway 32 to Plato, Missouri (37°31´03˝ N, 92°10´23˝ W). A small village of 109 people (up from 74 in 2000), Plato lies roughly 175 miles southwest of St. Louis.

Upon arrival, the first duty of the team, made up of workers from NOAA, the Census Bureau, and the Missouri Division of Geology and Land Survey, is to scout a suitable place to fix the 2010 commemorative marker. In a town as small as Plato, the task is quickly accomplished. On a prior scouting trip, Doyle had found a small park near the center of town. The bulk of Plato’s businesses—a post office, a bank, a café, and a farm supply store—are visible from the proposed site. A nearby granite monument tells of the town’s founding in 1858. The name Plato, as several of us had wagered, was taken from the ancient Greek philosopher. (Mike Ratcliffe, a cultural and historical geographer with the Census department, jokes that in addition to being in the middle of Missouri we are also “at the center of The Republic.”)

A small group of locals begins to congregate as Doyle launches into an impromptu presentation about the calculation and demographic significance of the centroid. From a gray duffel, he retrieves the twelve-inch steel disc along with hand-drawn plans for the marker’s housing: a squat pillar of Missouri red marble. Doyle hands the thirty-pound marker to Bob Biram, village councilman and liaison for the upcoming ceremony. Biram, clad in a camouflage ball cap, grunts lightly as he takes the metal disc in hand, holding it edgewise against his belly to steady the weight. “That is pretty,” he says with a smile.

But Biram bears bad news. Though he agrees the park would be an ideal place for the marker, he can’t grant permission because the village does not own the land. The parcel, the footprint of a former pharmacy, remains in the estate of the Tilley family, which once owned and operated the store. Ms. Tilley died a few years ago, but Biram believes that some of her relatives remain in the area. He offers to make some calls.

While waiting, the party decides to take lunch at Weber’s Café, Plato’s lone eatery (which also doubles as its sole grocery store). Over heaping servings of chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes, resident Barbara Pinkston asks Mike Ratcliffe about the precision of the count. Specifically, she wonders how the bureau knows with certainty that everyone has been included.

Ratcliffe explains the various protocols used by census takers to ensure an accurate count, including making repeat visits to households. “They are instructed to make six visits,” Ratcliffe explains. “After that, it becomes very expensive. So if they can’t get you in person, they’ll go to the neighbors to try to get a count of how many people live in your household.”

“But what if you just don’t want to be counted?” Pinkston asks. “Lots of folks around here get scared about the idea of a ‘head count.’ And they do whatever they can not to be found.”

Ratcliffe says that no matter how carefully the census is undertaken, there will always be uncertainties. He points out that the census is a “snapshot” in time, and that statistical estimates are used to help appraise the accuracy of the count. The bureau calculates a high, low, and middle figure based on different growth scenarios, he says. He explains that the count is then compared to these various statistical figures. “This year, it turned out that the number we got was very close to that middle figure,” says Ratcliffe. “That tells us that we were very accurate with our count.” With that, Pinkston seems satisfied.

But of course not everyone gets counted. While some citizens inevitably slip through the cracks, the centroid’s most serious limitation lies in its narrow definition of citizenship and legal residency and, by extension, its mathematical exclusion of anyone, past or present, who does not fit these narrow strictures. Between 1790 and 1850, not a single American Indian was tallied in the decennial census. Also uncounted were the tens of thousands of slaves who escaped the bondage of the plantation for northeastern cities before emancipation. Today there are an estimated 11 million undocumented (which is to say, uncounted) immigrants scattered across the country. Any talk of the centroid or its “advance” must be considered in light of these unaccounted-for populations.

When we finish lunch and emerge into the bright Missouri sun, Bob Biram has a smile on his face. He’s managed to make contact and is confident that the family will be happy to have the monument placed on their land. With the location nearly settled, we load up in the fleet of white Suburbans and trek to the “real” population center, which lies in the woods a few miles to the north.

We cross the edge of the cow pasture, ditch the vehicles, and head into the trees. The stream, Rock Creek, is only a few hundred feet ahead and a few inches deep. We wade across quickly, passing through a second dry streambed and into a thicket of blackberry bushes and small pines. After a few minutes, Doyle calls out for us to go slowly, then to stop. According to his GPS, we’ve arrived. Before us, in a small clearing, stands a thin, ragged hardwood sapling. As Doyle reaches to touch one of its leafless limbs, the group falls silent.

“This is it,” he says solemnly. “The center tree.”

Ratcliffe and Darrell Pratte, the director of the Missouri Land Survey Program, quickly gather a few pale chunks of limestone and construct a small cairn at the tree’s base. Here at the quantitative axis mundi, the nation’s population whirls around us like a great spiral galaxy or a hurricane about its eye. For a moment there is calm, quiet. The only sounds are wind in the treetops and water coursing lightly over stone.

And then someone laughs and the air of contemplation has passed. The center is restless, indefinable. It was no more “here” than where we’d been standing a few moments earlier, in the town of Plato. The census tells us the nation adds 227,000 people per month, a new Reno every thirty days. At that rate, another fifty-two people had entered the population in the few minutes we’d been standing under the scrawny tree at the nation’s momentary fulcrum.

The center was certainly not far away. Perhaps it was lingering in the next valley over, or languishing momentarily along the banks of Rock Creek. Maybe it was circling back in an eddy along the asphalt river of Highway 32. Maybe—but there was no point in thinking it would stop for us.

AGED FOURTEEN and without his parents’ approval, the future King Henry II hired a band of mercenaries, sailed from France to England, and failed to take two minor castles. In the realm of fiction, the audacious and adventurous Huckleberry Finn, only “thirteen or fourteen,” rebels against the mores of the time and decides not to betray Jim, the runaway slave. Had either Henry or Huck been born into a risk-averse society, they would have been enfeebled.

Attempting to take two minor castles may not feature on every child’s to-do list, but lighting fires, making shelters, using knives, and coping with darkness should: this is how children learn to paddle their own canoe—both actually and metaphorically.

Nevertheless, I’ve seen barriers erected around a fire on Bonfire Night with notices saying, STAND BACK—DANGER, as if children must always take their orders from the signage of authority rather than use their own judgment. Some schools forbid children to play in the snow for fear of legal action in the event of an accident. We live in a litigious age, but this is about far more than that: it is about the kind of children we are creating.

By insidiously demanding that children always seek permission for the most trivial of actions, that they must obey the commands of others at every turn, we ensure that children today are not so much beaten into obedience as eroded into it. A risk-averse society creates a docility and loss of autonomy that has a horrible political shadow: a populace malleable, commandable, and blindly obedient. (In Stanley Milgram’s famous attempts to explore the roots of the Holocaust, a key factor was people’s abject obedience to authority.) Physical freedom, however, models all kinds of freedom, for children learn with both body and mind. When they see themselves demonstrate physical courage, they also learn moral or political courage—and independent thought, which has profound political implications. I’ve never met a child who didn’t appreciate Robin Hood, an outlaw who nonetheless practices a powerful and independent sense of ethics.

But, people say, if children are not controlled, there will be chaos. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is cited as if it were documentary evidence, as if, without the authority of adults, children will become vicious little monsters. Children are made to read this malignant propaganda against their childhood selves, and its message is beloved by those who believe that the opposite of obedience is disobedience. But these are false opposites. The true opposite of obedience is not disobedience but independence. The true opposite of order is not disorder but freedom. Most profoundly, the true opposite of control is not chaos but self-control.

Indigenous philosophies of childhood overwhelmingly agree on one thing: that a child should not be forced into obedience but should have liberty of body, mind, and will. Inuit children have traditionally experienced extraordinary freedom and would become “self-reliant, caring, and self-controlled individuals,” an Inuit person I met in Nunavut told me. By the age of ten, their self-control is “almost infallible,” according to anthropologist Jean L. Briggs. Similarly, Amazonian myths place huge importance on self-restraint and self-discipline. Fairy tales seem to teach the same message, according to psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim: at the end of the tale, the child has “become an autocrat in the best sense of the word—a self-ruler . . . not a person who rules over others.” Far from creating selfish brats or Goldingesque monsters, this philosophy emphasizes that the corollary of liberty is self-control. When children are both allowed their will and encouraged to control themselves, community is well-served.

Self-regulation may be taught by fairy tales or by society, but, interestingly, children learn it naturally in one particular form of play: unscheduled, timeless, unstructured play in make-believe worlds. During this imaginative play, children talk to themselves in what psychologists call “private speech,” planning and thinking aloud, practicing self-regulation, controlling their emotions and behavior. This is not just a matter of “good behavior” but of autonomous thinking, the thought of artists, creators, and politically independent adults thinking for themselves, uncontrolled.

While children must learn to control themselves, what they can never control is luck. They must learn how to live with it, how to dance with chance and mischance. Children recognize life is a huge adventure, and they must accept the dare. “Setting out to seek one’s fortune” is the readying line of folk tales, leaving safe harbor to meet luck both good and bad. Children play with risk, draw straws with hazard. A lottery, a lucky dip, or a lucky number all appeal to children’s knowledge that life is riddled with luck and that freedom means being able to deal with chance. But the risk-averse society, denying hazard and what is hazardous alike, is not only annoying but conceptually malevolent. It works against the child’s instinct to find a working relationship with chance and risk—otherwise their adventures cannot even begin, and they will remain infantilized, stuck forever safe indoors in the house “hard by the great forest” (as many folk tales begin), with no chance of setting out on the quest through it.

Lord of the Flies opens with misadventure, as the children are stranded on the island. An odiously racist text, it describes the group of boys who become the cruel killers as a “tribe” of “savages,” hunting, dancing, chanting, and “garlanded,” with their long hair tied back: “a pack of painted Indians.” Evidence from anthropologists and missionaries and from indigenous cultures themselves contradicts this image, indicating that indigenous children traditionally learned the subtle and sure kind of civilization, through positive self-rule. The novel’s message is also directly contradicted by history.

For there actually has been a real-life Lord of the Flies incident, and the result was the opposite of what is portrayed in the novel. One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip. They left safe harbor, and fate befell them. Badly. Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe?

They made a pact never to quarrel, because they could see that arguing could lead to mutually assured destruction. They promised each other that wherever they went on the island, they would go in twos, in case they got lost or had an accident. They agreed to have a rotation of being on guard, night and day, to watch out for anything that might harm them or anything that might help. And they kept their promises—for a day that became a week, a month, a year. After fifteen months, two boys, on watch as they had agreed, saw a speck of a boat on the horizon. The boys were found and rescued, all of them, grace intact and promises held.

This true story is a testament to self-reliance and self-control, a story of how to cope with hazard, how to go on the adventure of life itself. As an allegory, it tells us this: if children are allowed the practice of freedom, they may act in their own wisdom, captains of their own souls, shipwrecked perhaps, but not spirit-wrecked.

I. Ice is a seed.

Balls of ice sowed seeds of life on Earth. That’s what comets are, just clumps of ice holding interstellar rocks and dust. But in that dust are amino acids and nucleotides that build living things. Many scientists think that this might be one way life began on Earth, 4 billion years ago, when the spinning arms of the galaxy cast comets over the planet, comets and comets and comets, protolife smacking onto the broken lava plains, until basins gathered the meltwater into oceans, and the oceans nurtured onrushing life.

Ice sows ice, too. The first grains gleamed in white sunshine, throwing back the sun’s heat and cooling their own small shadows. More ice formed in the cool places, and the shine of it cooled a larger shadow, until the reflectivity of the growing ice sheets cooled the whole planet, finally draped in dazzling layers of ice. Now the glaciers that remain in mountain valleys give life to rivers—the Ganges, the Fraser, the Colorado—as meltwater slides down blue rills and finally cuts a channel through gravel and till.

II. A seed is a book.

In hot winds at the end of summer, mountain mahogany seeds unfurl. Each pod sprouts a few white feathers, loosely coiled. A feather-seed lofts over the ridge and drifts onto dirt. After a hard rain, the seed swells and uncoils, augering its hard head into the soil. There it plants all the instructions for making a mountain mahogany sapling, laid out in the language of DNA.

A seed is a conveyance system for information. It is words taken wing—words written in the language of adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine, ancient instructions clasped between hard covers, everything needed to carry a story to a new place where it can take root. Long before writers figured it out, seed-bearing plants had found a way to convey to the next generation wisdom accumulated over millions of years. A samara is wisdom with ailerons. A dryas seed is a set of instructions with hair as wild as Einstein’s. A dandelion seed is an epic on a parachute. A sandbur seed is a poem stuck to a sock. An elm seed is a prayer book: This way is life. This way is rootedness.

III. A book is a river.

Again and again—in roots, in books, in rivers—this pattern repeats in nature: small things gather into larger things, which gather into larger things, which merge into one big thing. It’s a movement from the particular to the universal, as if the cosmos wanted everything ultimately to come together. In a book, stories, characters, all the consequences of betrayal and the possibilities of love converge—on a street corner, maybe, or an island—and something new is revealed. This is the art of the book. What had been many things becomes one thing, the layered geology of the human imagination, cut to bedrock truth.

Just so, a river gathers small evidence from high in mountain streams and carries it along, always along. A salmon egg, a hemlock branch, and the smell of dying fish join with silt from the uplands and roots of sage, and here is a new story unrolling. Along goes the river, gathering stories until they all converge in the sea. And what story does the sea tell? The history of all those uplands, the stories of lives won and lost, and the blue mystery of the unity of all lives, the unity of all stories, which is the saga of onrushing life.

IV. A river is onrushing life.

So what is one to do when a beloved river that once rushed past mighty cities now trickles from one diesel irrigation pump to another? Or when the glacier at the head of a river slowly retreats into its mountain cirque and sinks away, and a riverbank that once was a cottonwood swale sweet with birdsong is now only a cliff of broken concrete along a darkly muttering river? Last spring, I was lying on my back under a riverside tree, watching elm seeds tack downwind to make landfall on my face, and I thought, this is astonishing. This is a stunning and lyrical happenstance, that these green dories are what happens when a ball of ice gathers up the creative urgency of the universe and drops it onto Earth. And I thought, this cannot slip away, the millions of years it took to make this river, or to sew the sail on a maple seed or tuck building plans into a ball of cottonwood fluff. The wonder of this must not slip away. Now it seems like a right and good thing—for all of us, in all the ways we know how—to float the seeds of new life out into the currents of the rivers that flow across the wounded plain.

Let us, all of us, do the work of seeds—learning again how to bend toward the light, how to put down roots, how to live as a member of a community of living things. Let us do the work of books, imagining into existence new, better ways to live, seeking always what is lasting and beautiful. Let us do the work of rivers, gathering the Earth’s wisdom and carrying it like sunlight into the future. Let the power of our conviction and the new corrosiveness of our sorrow carve hard truths in the rocks.

Listen to a conversation with Basia Irland about art that restores, recorded on March 19, 2013.

THE LIST OF REASONS for not acting on climate change is long and ever-shifting. First it was “there’s no problem”; then it was “the problem’s so large there’s no hope.” There’s “China burns stuff too,” and “it would hurt the economy,” and, of course, “it would hurt the economy.” The excuses are getting tired, though. Post Sandy (which hurt the economy to the tune of $100 billion) and the drought ($150 billion), 74 percent of Americans have decided they’re very concerned about climate change and want something to happen.

But still, there’s one reason that never goes away, one evergreen excuse not to act: “you’re a hypocrite.” I’ve heard it ten thousand times myself—how can you complain about climate change and drive a car/have a house/turn on a light/raise a child? This past fall, as I headed across the country on a bus tour to push for divestment from fossil fuels, local newspapers covered each stop. I could predict, with great confidence, what the first online comment from a reader following each account would be: “Do these morons not know that their bus takes gasoline?” In fact, our bus took biodiesel—as we headed down the East Coast, one job was watching the web app that showed the nearest station pumping the good stuff. But it didn’t matter, because the next comment would be: “Don’t these morons know that the plastic fittings on their bus, and the tires, and the seats are all made from fossil fuels?”

Actually, I do know—even a moron like me. I’m fully aware that we’re embedded in the world that fossil fuel has made, that from the moment I wake up, almost every action I take somehow burns coal and gas and oil. I’ve done my best, at my house, to curtail it: we’ve got solar electricity, and solar hot water, and my new car runs on electricity—I can plug it into the roof and thus into the sun. But I try not to confuse myself into thinking that’s helping all that much: it took energy to make the car, and to make everything else that streams into my life. I’m still using far more than any responsible share of the world’s vital stuff.

And, in a sense, that’s the point. If those of us who are trying really hard are still fully enmeshed in the fossil fuel system, it makes it even clearer that what needs to change are not individuals but precisely that system. We simply can’t move fast enough, one by one, to make any real difference in how the atmosphere comes out. Here’s the math, obviously imprecise: maybe 10 percent of the population cares enough to make strenuous efforts to change—maybe 15 percent. If they all do all they can, in their homes and offices and so forth, then, well . . . nothing much shifts. The trajectory of our climate horror stays about the same.

But if 10 percent of people, once they’ve changed the light bulbs, work all-out to change the system? That’s enough. That’s more than enough. It would be enough to match the power of the fossil fuel industry, enough to convince our legislators to put a price on carbon. At which point none of us would be required to be saints. We could all be morons, as long as we paid attention to, say, the price of gas and the balance in our checking accounts. Which even dummies like me can manage.

I think more and more people are coming to realize this essential truth. Ten years ago, half the people calling out hypocrites like me were doing it from the left, demanding that we do better. I hear much less of that now, mostly, I think, because everyone who’s pursued those changes in good faith has come to realize both their importance and their limitations. Now I hear it mostly from people who have no intention of changing but are starting to feel some psychic tension. They feel a little guilty, and so they dump their guilt on Al Gore because he has two houses. Or they find even lamer targets.

For instance, as college presidents begin to feel the heat about divestment, I’ve heard from several who say, privately, “I’d be more inclined to listen to kids if they didn’t show up at college with cars.” Which in one sense is fair enough. But in another sense it’s avoidance at its most extreme. Young people are asking college presidents to stand up to oil companies. (And the ones doing the loudest asking are often the most painfully idealistic, not to mention the hardest on themselves.) If as a college president you do stand up to oil companies, then you stand some chance of changing the outcome of the debate, of weakening the industry that has poured billions into climate denial and lobbying against science. The action you’re demanding of your students—less driving—can’t rationally be expected to change the outcome. The action they’re demanding of you has at least some chance. That makes you immoral, not them.

Yes, they should definitely take the train to school instead of drive. But unless you’re the president of Hogwarts, there’s a pretty good chance there’s no train that goes there. Your students, in other words, by advocating divestment, have gotten way closer to the heart of the problem than you have. They’ve taken the lessons they’ve learned in physics class and political science and sociology and economics and put them to good use. And you—because it would be uncomfortable to act, because you don’t want to get crosswise with the board of trustees—have summoned a basically bogus response. If you’re a college president making the argument that you won’t act until your students stop driving cars, then clearly you’ve failed morally, but you’ve also failed intellectually. Even if you just built an energy-efficient fine arts center, and installed a bike path, and dedicated an acre of land to a college garden, you’ve failed. Even if you drive a Prius, you’ve failed.

Maybe especially if you drive a Prius. Because there’s a certain sense in which Prius-driving can become an out, an excuse for inaction, the twenty-first-century equivalent of “I have a lot of black friends.” It’s nice to walk/drive the talk; it’s much smarter than driving a semi-military vehicle to get your groceries. But it’s become utterly clear that doing the right thing in your personal life, or even on your campus, isn’t going to get the job done in time; and it may be providing you with sufficient psychic comfort that you don’t feel the need to do the hard things it will take to get the job done. It’s in our role as citizens—of campuses, of nations, of the planet—that we’re going to have to solve this problem. We each have our jobs, and none of them is easy.