The Endangered Dreams of Summer
Summer Chronicles #8*
By Jim Miller
It’s been an exuberant summer of travel as the pandemic has ebbed and more and more Americans hit the road to get out of the house, perhaps for the first time of any duration for over a year. With many still a bit leery of air travel, this has meant an explosion of visitors to our national and state parks. It’s heartening to see so many people out in the woods or by the beach, encountering wildlife and the vast array of beautiful natural landscapes that constitute our country’s greatest treasures.
Indeed, there is nothing quite as awe-inspiring as a field in full bloom or the chance spotting of a bear in the wilderness. Even bird watching in the local park is a wonder if one is lucky enough to catch a circling hawk or a beautifully colored songbird. In most cases, there is something deeply transformative about the kind of wonder that comes with being in nature and observing the world of our fellow creatures with care and sympathy.
But for those of us tuned into the grim news that has accompanied climate change, seeing the rare bird on a Hawaiian volcano or spotting an endangered sea or woodland creature elsewhere is tinged with deep melancholy. With the march of mass extinction as the Anthropocene unfolds, every such sighting has a chance to be the last.
As I have noted before from this soapbox, the scale of what is being lost is stunning. But as terrible as the devastation of biodiversity is in its own right, it’s also important to ask what this ecocide is doing to us personally, even as we survive to view the carnage.
The answer is that we may be losing something as precious as the resources and natural beauty that is vanishing before our eyes.
In Extinction: A Radical History, Ashley Dawson observes that:
[T]he wave of extinction that is decimating plants and animals around the planet strikes at the most intimate and potent of human faculties: our ability to imagine. The power of human dreams has historically been closely tied to the generative multiformity of the plant and animal life that surrounds us . . . As capitalism tears increasingly gaping holes in the beautiful web of life of which we are a part, our capacity to dream, to imagine different, more manifold worlds is radically impoverished.
Of course, it is precisely this kind of endangered imagination that we need if we are going to be able to salvage a sustainable world that maintains some of its beauty and richness, however inevitably diminished.
Thus, we should not surrender to cynicism about the throngs of tourists in campers flooding our parks this summer. Perhaps some of them will drink in enough of the gorgeous wild we have left to inspire them to imagine a world where their kids can show their kids the same thing.
Then maybe some of those young adults will remember enough to be the rewilding generation that seeks to again bless their part of the planet with the wild things that are the stuff of dreams. Despite our deep failings, one hopes the beauty in the fields, the woods, and at the beach can plant the seeds of a better future.
***
Summer Chronicles #8*
In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven-year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil (The Brazilian News) not as a reporter but as a writer of "chronicles," a genre peculiar to Brazil. As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, "allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or columns in the European or U.S. Press."
What Lispector left us with is an eccentric collection of "aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays, loosely defined as chronicles." As a novelist, Pontiero tells us, Lispector was anxious about her relationship with the genre, apprehensive of writing too much and too often, of, as she put it, "contaminating the word." It was a genre alien to her introspective nature and one that challenged her to adapt.
More than forty years later, in Southern California—in San Diego no less—I look to Lispector with sufficient humility and irony from my place on the far margins of literary history with three novels and a few other books largely set in our minor league corner of the universe. Along with this weekly column, it's not much compared to the gravitas of someone like Lispector. So, as Allen Ginsberg once said of Whitman, "I touch your book and feel absurd."
Nonetheless the urge to narrate persists. Along with Lispector, I am cursed with it--for better or worse. So, for a few lazy weeks of summer I will, as I have for a few years now, try my hand at the form.