From author Jim Ottaviani:

Near the end of Primates, we show Dian Fossey and Biruté Galdikas at the 1974 Werner-Gren Conference on “The Behavior of Great Apes,” discussing what we now call ecotourism. Fossey was not a fan:





So what would she think of an actual comic book about…her? At that time, probably not much, since the state-of-the-art back in the mid-1970s was along the lines of Evel Knievel: The Perilous Traps of Mr. Danger, Master of Kung Fu, and a whole bunch of Giant-Size titles, including one starring a creature called Man-Thing. (No, really.) I do have a soft spot for some of the later issues of Master of Kung Fu, but overall? Dismal and dismissible junk was the rule of the day.

The good news is that comics have changed in the decades since Drs. Fossey, Galdikas, and Goodall met up at that conference in Austria, and you now find them in bookstores, in classrooms, and on coffee tables of the literati. So if Dian Fossey saw what we today call graphic novels, she probably wouldn’t mind playing a leading role in one.

We hope not, anyway, since we think comics are an ideal medium to tell the story of these three pioneering scientists. In comics, the words provide one layer of meaning, the images another, and the reader’s imagination combines the two. Readers also share control with Maris and me of the pace with which the story unfolds—it’s a collaborative experience. And comics demand that readers fill in the gaps between the panels, interpolating the narrative where they’re missing information. It’s a process of discovery.

Imagination. Collaboration. Interpolation. Discovery. Sounds a lot like science-in-the-making to me.

In a way, comics and science are a natural combination—scientists rely on and use images to communicate more than any other discipline. (Thumb through a stack of books in the literature section of your local library, and then do the same in the science shelves. You’ll see.) And in this specific instance, a comic book—or graphic novel, if you prefer to call them that—about primatologists makes even more sense. Their work relied on careful and patient observation, and it happened in visually interesting places full of amazing sights and sounds.





And even though it seems counter-intuitive, the extended periods these scientists spent being still and seeing little of interest lend themselves to panel-to-panel storytelling.





And so with just a few lines, just a little ink on paper, we can see these women at work, and imagine ourselves in their place.





Well, maybe you can. The subtitle of Primates is “The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas” and I know I’m not fearless. But there are people out there who are; they just don’t know it yet. That’s why we made this book. Maybe they’ll discover their own brand of courage, and like these three scientists, forge new connections between humans and the natural world.

From illustrator Maris Wicks:

It is this connection to the natural world that is the root of conservation—in order to care for a place, one must care about it. The driving force behind all three of these scientists’ involvement in nature was their initial desire to explore, to experience. In addition to being the illustrator behind the images in Primates, I am also a part-time program educator at the New England Aquarium, where I try to make these same connections with visitors.





Take a moment to think about your first memorable experience with the outdoors— maybe it was witnessing a tadpole’s transition to a frog, or observing ants in their daily routine, or chasing fireflies on a warm summer night. Whether such a connection gives us a sense of place in the universe, or simply reminds us that we’re part of a larger ecosystem, it cultivates an interest, a pride, and a responsibility for the environment. Some might ask, “Why should I care about these animals that live halfway across the globe?” Part of conservation’s goal (I think) is to get people to see the connection between themselves and their environment on a local level, and to have that interest and responsibility transcend to a global level.

I hope Primates inspires even a fraction of the awe that moved Drs. Fossey, Galdikas, and Goodall (and Louis Leakey, who sent all three women to study the primates in their natural environments) to pursue and share their science. You don’t have to carry the title of “scientist” to make a difference. The simple act of learning about an animal or environment—and sharing that information and enthusiasm with others—plants the seed for care and stewardship.





Jim Ottaviani has written nonfiction, science-oriented comics since 1997, notably the New York Times bestseller, Feynman and Fallout. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Maris Wicks lives with fellow primate Joe Quinones and their cat, Biggs, in Somerville, Massachusetts. She has used her opposable thumbs to draw comics for Adhouse Books, Tugboat Press, and Spongebob Comics, and she has written stories for Image and DC Comics.

We couldn’t have said it any better. As unlikely as it may seem, writing that moves the mind and nourishes the spirit continues to be published by small, independent magazines and presses—and this year, we’re happy to report that Orion is one of them.

Among the winners of this year’s Pushcart Prize are “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist” (January/February 2012), a paradigm-cracking essay by Paul Kingsnorth on environmentalism’s troubled heart, and “Tallahatchie” (May/June 2012), Susan B. A. Somers-Willett’s hard and beautiful poem dedicated to the memory of Emmett Till.

We’re also excited to report two inclusions in the upcoming volume Best American Science and Nature Writing, an excellent collection of writing published annually by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This year, the honor goes to J. B. MacKinnon, for his exploration of the danger of nature (and the nature of danger), “False Idyll” (May/June 2012), and to Rick Bass, for his love letter to a forest’s old soul, “The Larch” (September/October 2012).

Congratulations, all.

This sound is as wet, wild, and weird as a voice can get. It was picked up by a hydrophone anchored to the bottom of Glacier Bay. Five miles of cable snakes past bathtub-sized halibut, colorful starfish, fluorescent sea pens, clacking crabs, snapping shrimp, and clam siphons the size of your wrist, and eventually plugs into a set of speakers continually spilling sound into the little corner office of my friend and neighbor Chris Gabriele—who, as a scientist for the Park Service, has devoted her life to trying to fathom what motivates humpback whales to do all the bizarre things they do. That’s a lot of cable out there, I say. For a whale, explains Chris, it’s all about sound; the acoustic habitat is like a tree to a robin, a rock to a barnacle.

Chris calls me up sometimes, says “Listen to this,” and holds her phone to those speakers while I press mine to my head as it fills with whooping hoots, bellowing groans, clicks the size of a federal building, and any manner of indescribable noises emanating from some school bus-sized winged-whale lurking in the cold depths. Sometimes Chris just leaves her phone by the speakers and goes back to her research paper due on Friday, and I let the dishwater get cold and just sit on the couch listening and grinning.

Later, while Chris is pulling the first spring weeds from her garden, I wander over and ask how they make all that racket. Do they use their lips? Nope, says Chris, a vocalizing whale makes no bubbles. They have a huge, expandable larynx. Far as we know, they’re passing air back and forth between mouth, larynx, and lungs—making all those sounds along the way. The laryngeal sac probably serves as a resonating chamber, making those deep bass notes.

“How big is that sac?” I ask. “Could you get a cat in there? A border collie?”

“When the sac’s inflated a sheep could wander around in there,” says Chris.

“Shorn or unshorn?” I ask.

“Wool and all,” says Chris.

So, here you have it: a sound first generated underwater by air trumpeting through airways a farm animal could get lost in, then getting picked up by the hydrophone with the five-mile cable, then Chris setting down her coffee cup to reach over and hit the record button—and now someone in Pittsburgh can listen in. Makes you wonder what that whale might say if he knew we’re all listening.

Enjoy.

(P.S. Don’t listen through those little speakers built into your laptop. Plug into better speakers or untangle a set of ear buds. It’s worth the effort. The sound is that wet, wild, and weird.)

Hank Lentfer is the author of Faith of Cranes. He lives on a creek bank in Gustavus, Alaska.

Did you know that some of the best places to go birdwatching are in the sewage treatment lagoons of major cities? Not only do creatures like birds and mice survive in cities; they’re thriving and evolving for life there, as a new study recently showed. In fact, if you know where to look, life abounds in so-called urban wastelands, such as vacant lots, road and rail waysides, brownfields, fencerows, dumps, and alleyways.

How much more life is evident in our cities? And how much has our thinking about urban nature evolved in recent years?

Join us for a free live discussion featuring urban ecologists from all over North America, including Beatrix Beisner, co-editor of the new urban ecology guidebook Nature All Around Us, Liam Heneghan of DePaul University/Chicago Wilderness Science Team, and Kevin Anderson, proprietor of the blog Marginal Nature. The event will take place on May 16, at 4 p.m. Eastern/1 p.m. Pacific.

The event is free to join, will be moderated by Orion staff, and is open to all readers and friends. Register here.

Orion hosts live web events every month. Sign up to be alerted by e-mail when a new one is announced.

The Wildbranch Writing Workshop is the country’s foremost writing workshop for people interested in honing their ability to write honestly and powerfully about the natural world. This year, join Orion editor-in-chief H. Emerson Blake and writers Alison Deming and Robert Michael Pyle for a week of writing and conversation in the rolling hills of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

Over the years, Wildbranch has served as a forum for conversation and community, but it’s also been a home to students and faculty who’ve gone on to produce beautiful writing about the natural world.

This spring, in fact, two books from former Wildbranch students have hit shelves: Kevin M. Bailey’s Billion-Dollar Fish: The Untold Story of Alaska Pollock and Julia Corbett’s Seven Summers, the story of a naturalist-turned-professor who flees city life to pursue a lifelong dream of building a cabin in the Wyoming woods.

Also of interest to prospective Wildbranch students will be Wildbranch: An Anthology of Nature, Environmental, and Place-based Writing, a collection of poetry and essays by more than fifty contributors associated with the Wildbranch Writing Workshops.

The application deadline for this year’s Workshop is May 10—apply today! Learn more and download the application form here.

See you in Vermont!

For example, this past January, in order to meet a commitment to write every day, I began rising before dawn and wrote until sunrise. This meant I had an hour or so before daylight and the stirring of my family signaled the end of the day’s early work. The assignment required that I develop a new routine. First rule: no houselights. I stoked the woodstove and boiled water in the dim light provided by my bicycle headlamp. Then, for reasons mostly romantic, I wrote in the small globe of light afforded by one candle, looking through the French doors out to the snowed-over yard.

Five a.m., but not really dark, the yard bright with snow and illuminated by what I came to think of as dual moons. The real one and a small, domesticated one in the form of a solar-powered paper lantern hung on an ornate iron crook in the dormant Budleja bed. The actual moon waned toward mid-month, then waxed to full by its end. It featured large in my writing. Every poem in some way moonie, moon-soaked. (Did I notice a small, brightening of mood in the lines on the page as the moon returned, fattened, taking up more space within the white pines as it drifted from east to west? I did.)

The moon set, the sun rose. My writing session was over. At least the sitting-at-table-watching-the-darkness-fail part was over. But the poem, or whatever it was the writing fragment was to be called, was not complete. The burgeoning thing needs air and a bigger view. Which often coincides handily with the dog, who needs his walk, and with my restlessness.

Where I write depends as much on the world outside my doorstep as what dwells inside. These days that includes a trail along the Mill River, in early spring the forest floor a carpet of trout lily, speckled leaves and yellow heads nodding, a few secret patches of Dutchmen’s breeches and purple trillium. Includes the grounds of the old State Hospital, the once so-called Asylum turned ghost town turned suburban development. Or, includes hipster coffee shop with found art and loud music by bands I’ve never heard of.

What I know is there’s a relationship between the inside and outside of writing. The place I sit—kitchen table or crumbling steps of Victorian-era building or booth carved with names—and the place I walk. Inside: candle burning to a stub, tea going cold in the cup. Outside: ruins, spring ephemera, a riverbank testament to rise and fall, flux.

Maya Smith Janson’s poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Murmur & Crush, was published in 2012. Her poem “When I Don’t Know What Kind of Bird I Am” appeared in the March/April 2013 issue of Orion.

Just as a piece of cultural and acoustic diversity is buried when the last native speaker of a language dies, there is a great loss when the original source of language and music becomes buried beneath the whine of wheels and drone of jets. I’ve often fantasized about some guy on the Lewis and Clark expedition carrying a parabolic dish and digital recorder alongside his musket and powder bag. Each morning, at daybreak, while his companions kindled the morning fire, he’d walk from camp and capture the voices of a continent unfettered by industrial sounds. He’d record the whisper of tall grasses, the thunder of 10,000 bison hoofs, the rush of a sky filled with passenger pigeons. He’d hear the scream of mountain lions beyond the edge of camp, the gurgle of the Columbia River unimpeded by dams, the sound of waves crashing on a new shore.

When I find myself getting bummed by all we have lost, it helps to remember that our culture is also responsible for the largest conglomeration of protected lands on the planet. The good old U.S. of A., exporter of Big Macs and Coke, is running the world’s grandest experiment in communal land ownership. Nowhere is that more evident than outside my door here in Alaska where the chirps, grunts, drips, growls and songs of the natural world still dominant. With enough hardtack and endurance, I could step off my porch and spend years exploring over 23 million contiguous wild babbling acres of public land.

While we can’t reach back two centuries and send a recorder along with Lewis and Clark, we can get a microphone in front of a calving glacier, beneath a singing thrush, alongside a bellowing humpback. And, for the next two years, that is what I, and good friend Richard Nelson, plan to do. (Check out Richard’s radio work here.) With financial support from the National Park Service and Friends of Glacier Bay, Richard and I, armed with omni-directional microphones, a bag of batteries, and can of bear spray will prowl and poke through the Glacier Bay’s 3.3 million acres, recording the grooviest and grandest sounds we can find.

In an effort to share these sounds with as many people as possible, we’ll come in from the wilds every two weeks, take a shower, eat some ice cream, and send along our best tracks to be posted on this blog. (Listen to Richard’s “Night Sounds” track below for a taste of things to come.) Through these posts we hope to remind ourselves and others that, along with the mess our grandchildren will inherit, we also have the opportunity to pass along vast stretches of country where bears still chase salmon beneath the shrill cry of eagles. And, more importantly, we hope the sounds emerging through your speakers will put a welcome pause in your day and smile on your face as you remember that, somewhere, the full orchestra of natural sounds grumbles and whispers and sings the same tune that tumbled back through the ears of our earliest ancestors.

Hank Lentfer is the author of Faith of Cranes. He lives on a creek bank in Gustavus, Alaska.

In case you’re still not convinced, here are ten more reasons to give a graduate (or anyone) a gift subscription to Orion:

1. It’s plastic-free, advertising-free, made from recycled paper, and will last a long time.
2. The recipient also gets a free, organic cotton t-shirt.
3. They’ll say, “How beautiful! I love it.”
4. The articles, essay, poetry, and fiction make for great summer reading.
5. They’ll think of you every time it arrives in the mailbox.
6. They can share the magazine with friends.
7. You’re showing you know they care about a better future for the planet.
8. It will inspire recipients to write, photograph, draw, and explore.
9. Each issue will spark their curiosity and inspire them to keep learning about our world.
10. Orion is unique—just like them.

Give a gift that will inspire. Give a gift subscription to Orion.

Earlier this month, Orion friend and columnist Sandra Steingraber was sent to an upstate New York prison for blocking a facility used to store hydrofracked natural gas. Sandra has continued to write from jail; her most recent, and final, letter from Chemung County Jail is below. She was released today, shortly after midnight.

My book, Raising Elijah: Protecting Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis, was released in paperback this week. But, being in jail, I was unable to grant interviews or otherwise to participate in its promotion. That’s not a situation that book publicists appreciate, although mine is being very good about it. But, being in here, I feel that I am walking my words.

The fundamental message of Raising Elijah is that the environmental crisis is a crisis of family life, as it robs parents of our ability to carry out our two most basic duties: to protect our children from harm and to provide for their future. When inherently toxic chemicals—including developmental toxicants linked to asthma, birth defects and learning disabilities—are legally allowed to freely circulate in our children’s environment, we can’t protect them. When heat trapping greenhouse gases create extreme weather events that slash the world’s grain harvests (this is happening) and acidify the oceans in ways that threaten the entire marine food chain, starting with plankton (and this is happening too), then we can’t plan for our kids’ futures—no matter how much we sock away in their college funds or Tiger Mom them into athletic or musical mastery.

This crisis requires our urgent attention. And by attention, I mean sustained political action, not intermittent, private worrying. Hence, unless the kids can get there and back, under their own steam, then piano lessons, karate, Little League, play practice, SAT prep, and Scout meetings are cancelled until further notice. Ditto for yoga, date night, and book club (with apologies to my long-suffering publicist).

Look, one in every four mammal species is headed for extinction. The world’s available drinking water is becoming less and less available. Insect pollinators, which provide us one-sixth to one-third of the food we eat, are in trouble. The price index for thirty-three different basic commodities is rising, and financial analysts are predicting shortages of the kind that lead to social unrest. Meanwhile, the world’s leading and most powerful industry is preparing to blow up the nation’s bedrock and frack out the last wisps and drops of gas and oil—releasing inherently toxic chemicals into our communities to do so.

In short, we don’t have time for out-of-town sporting events. Consider this commentary in the preeminent science journal, Nature:

I have yet to meet a climate scientist who does not believe that global warming is a worse problem than they thought a few years ago. The seriousness of this change is not appreciated by politicians and the public. . .  Recognition of the facts is delayed by the frankly brilliant propaganda and obfuscation delivered by energy interests that virtually own the US Congress . . . This is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence. I implore you to be brave. (Nature, 491, Nov. 15, 2012)

The author, Jeremy Grantham, was speaking to the world’s scientists, but his message is equally applicable to mothers and fathers. Consider that the World Health Organization has identified climate change as the number one threat to public health for people born today. Otherwise known as our kids.

Now, do you have time to participate in a civil rights–style uprising? Protecting our kids, making sure they have a future: it seems to be a basic part of our job description.

I AM HERE in the Chemung County Jail on a charge of trespassing as a result of blockading a compressor station site belonging to the nation’s largest gas transportation and storage company. Inergy’s plan is to compress, liquify, and store fracked gases from out of state in depleted salt caverns under Seneca Lake, the largest and deepest of New York State’s eleven Finger Lakes. This practice has led to catastrophic results in other states—including explosions and collapses. Even now, Inergy itself is chronically out of compliance with the maximum legal limits for its chemical discharges into this lake, which is the source of drinking water for 100,000 people.

This compressor station, which is less than twenty miles upwind from my house, is just one piece of fracking infrastructure among millions. I chose to take a stand here both because Inergy’s plans represent a direct risk to my children’s air quality and safety, and because my son was born nearby. The west shore of Seneca Lake is his birthplace, and the sound of green frogs twanging in the night was the theme song for my labor and delivery.

So, yes, my course of political action has taken me away from my own children in an attempt to redress this problem on their behalf, and during the first five days, when I was kept in twenty-four-hour lock-up, I had no access to them. But I am convinced the tears of my children now will be less than their tears later—along with the tears of my grandchildren—if we mothers do nothing and allow the oil, coal, and gas companies to hurdle us all off the climate cliff.

I’m also aware that human rights movements throughout history—from abolition to suffrage to civil rights—included many people who were parents of young children. They were surely just as busy as you and me. They, like I, probably also kept a list labeled, “Things to do before going to jail.” Their list, like mine, probably included: making meal plans, paying bills, cleaning the bathroom, and finding a costume for the school play.

To fight against Hitler, anti-fascist partisans sent their children away to safe places in case they were betrayed. They were busy parents, too. They loved their children just as much as we do. The difference is: Now there is no safe place for our children. We can’t hide them from the ravages of climate change.

And here are two observations from the inside: the jails are already full of mothers. Every single woman on my cell block has kids. One of them is trying, from behind bars, to find her son a kidney because he desperately needs one. That’s hard to do from a pay phone, but she’s doing it. And yet, what do you suppose Marlene (not her real name) spoke about with me as we walked around and around the walled-off, barbed-wire rec area at 6:35 a.m. this morning? The same thing that mothers throughout New York State are talking about this morning—how our kids are handling the state testing. Last week was ELA. This week is math.

The mothers in jail are fierce and proud. When the male guards insult them, they insult back. Their voices echo down the corridor, penetrate the iron doors and walls, carry messages through the heating vents and, when they can, out the windows. When another inmate, nicknamed Stingray, cussed out a guard for demanding she remove a towel from her face while sleeping, she received six days in “the box.” So she told me while we were all lined up against the wall to head out for rec. An hour later, when the guard ordered us to line up and come in, she did not walk meekly to the door. Instead she ran the other direction and then, in a stunning gymnastic display, turned a whirling series of cartwheels, round-offs, and flips, landing—Olympic-champion style—at the guard’s feet. Stingray has two kids and is six months pregnant with the third.

Imagine what we mothers could do if we brought that spirit of loud, uncompromising, creative defiance to the necessary project of dismantling the fossil fuel industry and emancipating renewable energy, which is its hostage? Imagine hundreds and hundreds of mothers peacefully blockading the infrastructure projects of the fossil fuel industry, day after day. Imagine us, all unafraid, filling jails across the land. Imagine the press conferences we would give upon our release. Imagine us living up to our children’s belief in us as superheroes.

As Stingray shouted down the vent to another inmate yesterday, “You know I’m loud. My words are my magic.”

Sandra Steingraber’s column in the May/June 2013 issue of Orion, “The Discontent of Our Winter,” discusses motherhood and climate change. Next year, her daughter will learn to drive on upstate New York roads that will or won’t be filled with fracking trucks. Photo by John Armstrong.

Earlier this month, Orion friend and columnist Sandra Steingraber was sent to an upstate New York prison for attempting to block a facility used to store hydrofracked natural gas. Sandra has continued to write from jail—she wrote the following letter, which is addressed to environmental leaders across the country, on a scrap of paper, with a stub of pencil.

While confined in the Chemung County Jail, here in the southern tier of upstate New York, I have had to think deeply and long about the environmental community’s response to the boom in natural gas extraction from shale via hydraulic fracking, which is now sweeping the nation, from west to east. I write to share with you my insights regarding the split within our community over whether to embrace a regulatory approach to fracking, or to press for bans and moratoria.

I’ll begin by explaining why I am in jail. Last month, on the west shore of Seneca Lake, I stood with other local residents on a driveway owned by Inergy, LLC.

In so doing, we blockaded a gas compressor station site and prevented a company truck, carrying a drill head in its truck bed, from going where that truck wanted to go. When we refused to disband, we were arrested and charged with trespassing. When three of us further refused, at our arraignment on April 17, to pay the resulting fine, we were each sentenced to fifteen days in jail.

As the nation’s largest energy storage and transportation company, Inergy provides the infrastructure for fracking—including within states like New York, where high-volume, horizontal fracking is not allowed. Missouri-based Inergy has purchased more than 500 acres of lakeshore property along the banks of our state’s largest and deepest lake. Seneca Lake is so large and deep that it creates its own temperature stabilizing microclimate, which provides the necessary ecological conditions for our state’s world-class Riesling grapes. Wineries flourish on the hillsides about both banks of the Finger Lake. Inergy is interested in neither the wine grapes nor our unique climate. It does not care about Seneca Lake’s designation as the Lake Trout Capital of the world, nor the tranquil views that draw tourists and fill summer cottages. Nor, more basically, with the fact that Seneca Lake is the drinking water source for 100,000 people.

Inergy’s interest is, instead, focused on the landscape below the surface—namely the abandoned caverns left over from a century of solution salt mining that lie 1,500 feet beneath and beside the lake shore. Inergy’s plan is to repurpose these salt caverns to serve as storage for billions of barrels of fracked gases, which will be brought to Seneca Lake by rail and by truck from other states. However, these fuels will not be stored in barrels. The caverns themselves will serve as the receptacle for the pressurized, liquefied, explosive gases.

The Seneca Lake 12—as we arrestees call ourselves—fear that Inergy’s planned storage facilities pose serious risks, including calamitous ones. As journalist Peter Mantius reports in DC Bureau, salt caverns represented only 7 percent of the nation’s 407 underground storage sites for gas in 2002, but, between 1972 and 2004, they were responsible for all ten catastrophic accidents involving gas storage. In Belle Rose, Louisiana, the fourteen-acre sinkhole that is now making headlines was caused by the collapse of a gas-filled salt cavern. As a result, surface and groundwater have been contaminated,and an entire community faces relocation.

In addition to the risk for outright catastrophe, we Seneca Lake 12 object to the heavy industrialization of the pristine Finger Lakes region that we call home. Along with the twenty-four-hour light pollution from the industrial lighting of the drill rigs and the twenty-four-hour noise from the compressors, this facility will fill our scenic highways with fleets of diesel trucks and send train cars of hazardous, flammable cargo over our rickety rail trestles. A sixty-foot flarestack will send carcinogens and ozone precursors into our air. (My home is fifteen miles downwind; my eleven year old has a history of asthma.) Our deepest concerns are for the water. Inergy’s hillside pits have already leaked, salt geysers have already spewed, lake side vegetation has already died and, in spite of the fact that Inergy’s discharges of effluent chemicals into the lake have been out of compliance for the past twelve consecutive quarters, Inergy applied for and received from the State of New York a permit to discharge 44,000 additional pounds of chloride into the lake. Every single day.

In a larger way, our act of civil disobedience—for which I now wear an orange jumpsuit and reside in a six by seven foot cell—is directed at the practice of shale gas extraction itself. This is why, with our arms linked, we unfurled a banner with the words, “Our Future is Unfractured.” Clearly, a massive build-out of fracking’s infrastructure—the storage facilities; the pipelines, the compressors and condensers; the access roads; the underground injection wells for the disposal of fracking waste; the ethylene “crackers” that turn the byproducts of wet gas into ingredients for the petrochemical industry—is a necessary precondition for fracking to occur. As it boasts in its communiqués to investors and clients, Inergy intends to serve the Marcellus shale gas boom by turning the Finger Lakes region into the Northeast’s storage and transportation hub for the vaporous gases so obtained. Thus, taking a stand against infrastructure projects that aid and abet fracking not only draws attention to the public health and environmental harms created by the projects themselves but also signals objection to fracking and, even more fundamentally,to the further entrenchment of fossil fuel dependency in a time of climate emergency.

To this end, there are many fracking infrastructure projects near my home in upstate New York where I might have chosen to plant my flag as a first-time civil disobedient. In Horseheads, there is a storage depot for fracking chemicals headed for the gas fields of Pennsylvania. In Painted Post, a processing facility for fracking sand. Near the jail where I am housed here in Elmira, a landfill accepts radioactive drill cuttings from out-of-state operations. So, why protest at a compressor station site? The answer, for me, is highly personal. My son Elijah was born in a birth center on a hill overlooking Seneca Lake, just down the road from the new compressor station.The west shore of Seneca—where I walked when in labor—is a charmed place for me. And the burial of explosive hydrocarbon gases beneath it is, for me, a desecration.

But particulars aside, it’s the generic, cumulative, systemic and ubiquitous impacts of drilling and fracking operations and their associated infrastructure projects across the nation that is the first topic I want to raise with you in this letter.

Fracking, and the multitude of corollary activities that enable it, is turning this nation inside out. Consider that, by weight, the new number one commodity sent beyond its borders by the State of Wisconsin—which does not even engage in fracking—is silica sand. (Prized for its ability to withstand the lithostatic pressure of the earth without crumbling, grains of silica sand are shot into the shards of shale during fracking operations in order to prop the cracks open, so that the oil or gas can flow out of them.) In other words, Wisconsin is now exporting itself. The sand counties of Aldo Leopold are being loaded onto barges, trucks, and railcars headed for the fracking fields of America. Hills, bluffs, coulees: they are all going. Big parts of formerly rolling Wisconsin are now, thanks to frack sand mining, as flat as Illinois. In the process, surface water is silted, groundwater is threatened, and air fills with silica dust—a known lung carcinogen and a known cause of the disabling disease silicosis. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, drilling and fracking operations fragment millions of acres of intact, interior forests—along with the ecosystem services they provide. Nationally, thanks to fracking, energy extraction has become the number one land use; the U.S. has more acreage leased for oil and gas than planted in wheat or soy.

Against this backdrop of epic transformation of the landscape and mass industrialization of rural America, the policy discussions about fracking emerging from your respective organizations are remarkably narrow and conciliatory. Partnering with industry, Environmental Defense Fund focuses on calculating methane emissions rates from well pads and, together with the Heinz Endowments, promulgating voluntary standards for fracking based on “best practices.” The dubious notion of “sustainable shale” aside (by what definition of “sustain” can any non-renewable fossil fuel be described, let alone the methane bubbles trapped inside the Marcellus Shale, whose recoverable reserves have been re-estimated sharply downward by geologists and are now believed to provide only six years worth of U.S. gas usage), the Center for Sustainable Shale fails to consider the devastating collateral damage created by all the corollary activities that necessarily accompany shale gas extraction: strip-mining for sand, clear cutting of forests, and destruction of productive farmland are just three. While you consider industry best practices such as green completion, recycling of fracking fluid, and strict engineering standards for well casings, you entirely ignore the massive amounts of steel and cement—miles and miles of it for every well—that must be manufactured, transported, and entombed in the Earth for the one-time,short-term, un-recyclable use of shale gas extraction (in the case of the Marcellus Shale, a one-time use for six years of gas).

Should Governor Cuomo decide to pursue full development of shale gas via high-volume horizontal hydrofracking, the amount of steel alone that would be buried in New York State will exceed, by 2.5 times, the entire tonnage of the U.S. Navy Fleet (as calculated by Cornell engineer Tony Ingraffea). To my knowledge, no one has estimated the amount of steel and concrete consumed by the fracking industry on a national basis for use as well casings and casing strings. Consider, however,that the production of both materials is fossil-fuel intensive and that, on a worldwide scale, cement manufacturing along is responsible for six percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. Those same resources—and the jobs they provide—could be directed toward the construction of renewable energy infrastructures and the smart grid they require.

The advocacy of “sustainable shale” is provincial not only because it fails to consider radical alterations to land use wrought by fracking and the costly sacrifice of carbon-intensive resources, but also because it utterly ignores the ongoing fracking-driven transformation of our materials economy. Fully 30 percent of natural gas is used not as a source of domestic energy but in manufacturing, a big chunk of which is diverted for use in petrochemical manufacturing. Fully 5 percent of the world’s natural gas supply is consumed to make the petrochemical fertilizer anhydrous ammonia. Natural gas is also the starting point for the manufacture of polyvinyl chloride (PVC plastic). The “wet gases,” such as ethane, that are blasted out of the ground with methane are used in the manufacture of other petrochemical plastics. And these are just a few examples. As you know, the U.S. chemical industry is experienced a parallel boom in activity as a direct result of cheap, abundant shale gas.

Accelerated petrochemical manufacture brought on by fracking has profound environmental and public health consequences. Cheap, abundant agricultural chemicals undermine the local, organic food movement and keep our nation’s farm system running onthe pesticide treadmill. Anhydrous ammonia fertilizer is responsible for the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the destruction of aquatic ecosystems throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and contamination of groundwater aquifers throughout rural America. Last Thursday’s deadly explosion at the West Fertilizer Company in Texas—which destroyed lives and homes across a vast swath of land—reveals the inherent dangers of relying on volatile petrochemicals as a source of agricultural nitrogen. Once again: natural gas is the starting point for anhydrous ammonia manufacture (say what you will about downsides of sustainable agriculture, but green manure, compost tea, and crop rotation never blew up a nursing home). In sum, the fracking boom—whether regulated or unregulated, guided by best practices or worst—further deepens the dependency of our nation’s food system on non-renewable fossil fuels at precisely the moment when we desperately need to be calling for its emancipation. In this, natural gas is not a bridge but a perilous detour.

Likewise in chemical manufacturing, fracking, by making petrochemicals cheaper and more abundant, undoes gains in toxic chemical reform, green chemistry, and green engineering.The plastics that will be created by a proposed new cracker facility in Pittsburgh from the wet gases of fracking solve a waste disposal problem of the energy industry—and make fracking more profitable—but, at the same time, add to the burden of unbiodegradable materials that we are, as individual citizens, encouraged to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Inevitably, much of this fracked plastic will end up in the oceans, adding to garbage patches and contaminating aquatic food chains. Meanwhile the cracking facility itself will add ground-level ozone (smog) to a Pennsylvania community already in non-attainment for ozone, and thus add to the community’s burden of asthma, heart attack, stroke, and preterm birth. How is this sustainable?

In my home state of Illinois—where no fracking is currently occurring—the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council has joined hands with industry to draft model regulations for fracking (which are not as strict as those that we rejected in New York). The Sierra Club’s subsequent endorsement of the fracking regulatory bill now under consideration by the State legislature has allowed pro-fracking forces in both government and industry to claim that Sierra Club has endorsed regulated fracking. In separate conversations this year with both Frances Beineke of NRDC and Michael Brune of Sierra Club, I was told that a nation-wide ban on fracking—or even moratoria in all states—would be “unrealistic” for political reasons. What seems to me less realistic—politically—is to imagine that the oil and gas industry, which has already exempted itself from federal laws and surrounds itself with secrecy, would willfully follow any regulations or voluntary standards of any kind. Ironically, the very states that are most vulnerable to fracking for reasons of economic desperation are those least able, because of massive budget cuts, to enforce regulations and provide oversight for an industry whose wells and infrastructure will be distributed across the landscape.

Meanwhile, land in Missouri and up and down the Illinois River is being readied for sand stripmining in anticipation of fracking’s debut in Illinois, and the Shaunee National Forest, a haven of biodiversity, in southern Illinois, is being opened for drilling activity. The results will neither be sustainable nor regulatable.

With fracking, the mainstream environmental community has lost its way, aligning itself with those who believe that now is not the time to embrace renewable energy and declare the fossil fuel party over.

The voices that cry “wait” and capitulate to powerful industry forces through their willingness to trade one fossil fuel for another are taking us down a perilous path. It is time to say now—grassroots groups and big green groups together—that the unholy trinity of coal, oil and gas is part of a ruinous past and; that further investments in new techniques to blast these deadly fossils from the bedrock are a waste of time, money, water, air, trees, health and farmland; and that well-intentioned attempts to regulate and police the resulting mess is a waste of human ingenuity that could be better spent re-imagining and retooling our economy and our culture for the post-carbon age. We don’t need to design filters for cigarettes—they provide only false assurances of safety and only delay the initiation of entirely new habits and attitudes.

With respect and toward the unfracked future,

Sandra Steingraber

Sandra Steingraber’s column “The Silence of Science” appeared in the January/February 2013 issue of Orion. Learn more about Sandra’s writing and activism—including updates on her incarceration—at the Raising Elijah Facebook page. Painting by Robert Shetterly.

Today, at 4 p.m Eastern, join Eva and poet/scientists Gary Paul Nabhan, Elizabeth Bradfield, and others for a free, live conversation about science and poetry. Register here.

Tell us about your path from science to poetry. Did one come first, with the other following?

My path started with music, actually. I studied oboe at Northwestern University as a freshman, but struggled with the atmosphere of fierce competition among the music students. I also struggled with being trapped indoors, practicing, rehearsing, and making reeds for long hours each day. I’d stare out the practice room’s narrow window at Lake Michigan with intense longing.

So when I convinced myself that I could make another choice, I sought a career path that would put me outside as much as possible. I decided on forestry, thinking it would train me to be a forest ranger. When I realized that forestry was actually about managing trees for harvest, not wandering in the woods in a ranger hat, I focused on fish and wildlife biology.

Poetry and art came into my life during graduate school, thanks to two field assistants who spent months with me in Prince William Sound living on an island and following whales in a small boat, recording their calls and observing their behavior. My first field assistant was a sculptor, and the second was a poet. They taught me how to see in new ways. They asked different questions than the ones I was asking for my study, and those questions compelled me more and more.

Molly Lou Freeman, the poet/assistant, brought dozens of books out into the field to fill our wall tent’s shelf. She introduced me to poets like Tess Gallagher, Moya Cannon, and Adrienne Rich. She wrote daily. From me, by day, she learned the practice of biology. From her, by night, I learned the practice of poetry. Poetry and writing became an integral and essential part of our daily routine.

I realized that I needed a language besides the scientific to express my experience of living in wilderness, studying orcas and coming to terms with myself. I love biology. I love fieldwork. But it is not enough to sustain me. After I received my MS in Marine Biology, I began an MFA program in creative writing, in Fairbanks, Alaska, while continuing to study orcas, write scientific papers and reports, and work in the field. I have no doubt studying and practicing poetry has made me a better biologist. 

What qualities make for a good biologist? Are they ever the same as, or complementary to, the qualities that make a great poet?

So many qualities are the same. They are, after all, both creative pursuits. I once made a huge list of them for a talk I gave to graduate students in creative writing, but I’ll just name a few here.

First of all, poets and scientists must be keen observers. In my twenties, the greatest compliment I could imagine receiving from my orca biologist mentors was having “a good eye.” A person with a good eye sees what others miss, detects nuances, is arrested by anomalies in the landscape. My graduate biology work focused on acoustics of orcas, and my musical training had given me a good ear. That, I learned, was essential to the practice of poetry, too.

A second quality that a good field biologist and poet must cultivate is patience, the ability to sit still and wait. Orcas are not always easy to find. I’ve searched for fourteen days straight without an encounter. How you live those fourteen days is, I believe, the crucible, the ultimate test of a field biologist. A poet, likewise, must sit and wait, must cultivate an attitude of receptivity, of not forcing. So many pages lead to nothing, but we write them anyway, knowing, at any moment, a poem may present itself.

And finally, there’s the role of intuition, of instinct. An astounding amount of intuition comes into play when searching for animals and collecting data in the field. Learning to trust one’s instincts is hard-won, and not taught in any degree program. In poetry, my greatest challenge was to learn to trust in the power of the line, to follow the line, and not my rational mind, to tap into instinct, like an animal following a scent trail. 

How does your poetry writing and scientific practice interact on a day-to-day basis? Do you wear a lab coat during the day and pick up a pencil at night?

Thankfully for my poetry, studying orcas in Prince William Sound gives one a lot of down time. I go out into the field with my husband for two or three weeks at a time, just the two of us on a thirty-four-foot boat. We are often weathered in during storms, tucked away in a hidden cove at anchor with no cell phone service, no Internet, no distractions of that sort. I’ve written many poems and essays sitting at our galley table, the boat spinning around the anchor in wind gusts, rain pelting the deck.

There’s nothing I love more than staring out the window, scribbling in my journal, drinking cup after cup of tea, until I can’t stand it anymore and have to don rain gear, clear my head, and hike. Nights, when my husband is asleep after a long day following orcas, I often stay up to write. It never gets completely dark in midsummer. That never-night time is when poetry comes.

During the rest of the year, when we’re not out in the field, I have to juggle science writing and poetry writing. I usually do my creative writing early in the morning, when it’s still dark outside. I guess I’m a crepuscular writer. Once it’s full daylight, my rational mind kicks in, and I can more easily shift gears into science mode. 

Why did we ever come to believe that science and poetry—these two ways of exploring and explaining the world’s mysteries—were at odds with one another?

We’ve put science into its own special and separate box in our culture, and pushed poetry and other arts to the fringe. They are extracurricular. They are expendable, the first to go from schools when budgets get cut. Technology has so rapidly changed life on this planet that it has become god-like to us. We look to technology to save us from ourselves.

As a cancer survivor, I know this desperate impulse, to obsessively track research progress, hoping for news of a breakthrough, a cure. It is a tremendous distraction from the real and pressing questions: How to reckon with mortality, how to discover meaning in its face.

How did we come to believe poetry and science were at odds with one another? Perhaps because we came to believe so wholeheartedly in the notion of the right brain and left brain, in the splitting of mind and spirit/heart into two halves, and the privileging of one half over the other.

What sort of question might a poet answer that a scientist could not? And vice versa?

Science is a process of overturning conclusions, of refining and revising them as new data comes in. Just when we think we know something definitive about orcas, for example, they do something unexpected. In science, you fail to reject a hypothesis with such and such a degree of uncertainty. You don’t prove anything. It’s a process, a continually evolving understanding of how we imagine the world works. There is no end to it.

For me, poetry moves toward and into uncertainty; like science, it pushes up against the edges of knowing. We write it to find out what we don’t know. We write it to go beyond ourselves. That said, we don’t need poetry to tell the story that science tells, only with line breaks. We need poetry to ask the questions that science doesn’t, and can’t, ask. Because we desperately need as many paths toward knowing as we can follow, now more than ever.

Our times are precarious and science alone can’t save us. The questions that science can’t answer are questions of the heart and spirit. When I wrote my memoir Into Great Silence, about a vanishing group of orcas in Prince William Sound, I was trying to face a coming extinction, the disappearance of animals I’ve come to know intimately over twenty-five years. Science could teach me about the mechanics of extinction, the biological consequences—it could help me wrap my head around the concept. But science couldn’t tell me how to wrap my heart around it. That’s the work of poetry.