How wild is London?

This is the first in a series of installments that I plan to write about my recent experiences in London. These will alternate on my two blogs, as I was there to discover both parks and the wealth of arts that London has to offer. In the end I envision a synthesis of these interests for one of the most important things I learned in London, an enormous city that is both ancient and modern, is that separating things into discrete categories is difficult and in the end a distortion of the total experience.

Installment 1: Arrival

The aluminum tube with wings that delivered my wife and me across the Atlantic Ocean lands without incident at Heathrow Airport somewhere on the outskirts of London. After a brief train ride aboveground through a dreary-looking urban landscape, reminiscent of BBC productions of Masterpiece Mystery, we are deposited in Paddington Station. We descend to London’s famous underground for a ride on the Tube. An hour and a half and two transfers later, we ascend two long escalators. We have traversed most of London and crossed under the river Thames, although there is no way of knowing this. Completely disoriented, we huddle in the shelter of the Cutty Sark Station in Greenwich, greeted with gusting flurries of snow.

Our ten-day adventure in London begins with this auspicious sign. Others might have viewed it with apprehension. Snow in April, while not unheard of, is definitely not what we expected. We would soon learn that Londoners too were particularly happy to be rid of March, which had broken records for cold temperatures. So far April was proving to be similarly disappointing. But for me the blustery weather signals the presence of the unexpected, which author David Gessner identifies as one of the primary characteristics of the wild.

Gessner proclaims, “…wildness can happen anywhere. You can’t put a fence around it. It can happen in the jungle or on a city river.” Perhaps even on a city street, although I wouldn’t want to pound the idea into meaninglessness. This snow isn’t what I came to London to experience by any means. I would have been far happier with warm sunshine. But the unseasonable snow is nature’s way of asserting itself—inserting itself into even one of the largest cities on the planet. And its unpredictability quotient has increased in recent years, to the point where only the few and the rigidly ideological deny the effects of climate change.

Still dragging my rolling luggage behind me, I tighten my scarf, zip up my coat, and walk into the swirl of snow. Welcome to London.

The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The towers of London's docklands dissolve in the misty background. 

To read installment number 2, about London's National Gallery of Art, click here. 

What a difference a day makes!

 

Yesterday’s high of 61° melted what little ice remained on the river. That on top of the rainfall made the Menomonee River bulge. The ground thawed as well. As evening fell, a thick ground fog rose over muddy soccer fields here at Hoyt Park as well as over the river. I became confused when I first stepped outside. My body, like muscle memory, reacted with relief and joy at the spring-like warmth. Even so, it felt wrong mentally, for I knew it couldn't be spring. Groundhog Day is still three days away!

Today, of course, we had snow. Twenty-four hours later it is 26° and still falling towards a projected low of 11°. The river is even higher; the soccer fields a featureless sheet of white.

High water, erratic temperatures and extreme weather events have become the new normal in this time of climate change. Just ask those who are still rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy. And those of us who believed in global warming all along feel no satisfaction in saying, “I told you so” to all those who didn’t. (At least I don’t.)

We thought we had dominion over nature. We fought--and, sadly, continue to fight--the wilderness into submission, making casualties of innumerable species, but we cannot conquer the wild. It returns with a vengeance.

What a difference a day makes. The trees that were mown down in one day in order to pave the way for progress at Innovation Park (see previous post) will not grow back in a day, or a year, or in our lifetimes. The climate will not go back to normal in our lifetimes either. We can bulldoze the landscape but when we strip nature we leave ourselves naked.

Try as we do, we cannot fence out the wild. The more we suppress it the greater its fury.

We must learn to live again with nature, to feel one with nature. Plant new trees, yes. But we must be very cautious about the ones that remain. They are more than symbolic of our willingness to compromise our earthly nest; they embody our spirit.

So—while there still is snow—go for a run in it with your mouth wide open.

Geoengineering: Is it possible to stop?

image credit: Jacob Escobedo

In a recent article in the New York Times entitled "Geoengineering: Testing the Waters" author Naomi Klein warns of possible dangers and unintended consequences of this practice, which is gaining momentum. Klein cites a "growing number of would-be geoengineers who advocate high-risk, large-scale technical interventions that would fundamentally change the oceans and skies in order to reduce the effects of global warming." She also tells the story of a "rogue geoengineer" who took it upon himself to dump "120 tons of iron dust off the hull of a rented fishing boat" into the ocean off British Columbia. "The plan was to create an algae bloom that would sequester carbon and thereby combat climate change."

Only the most extremely ideological now question the significance of global warming and the consensus among scientists is that humankind is contributing to it. In light of this it is tempting to think that we also can come up with a technological solution, which is what geoengineering is all about.

As Klein puts it, "Geoengineering offers the tantalizing promise of a climate change fix that would allow us to continue our resource-exhausting way of life, indefinitely. And then there is the fear. Every week seems to bring more terrifying climate news, from reports of ice sheets melting ahead of schedule to oceans acidifying far faster than expected." Something must be done about it!

We humans have been tinkering with our environment since we learned to harness fire and divert streams for irrigation. It seems unlikely that we will stop anytime soon.

But the dangers are real that the effects of geoengineering will be more harmful than beneficial and that our future may look like any one of a number of post-apocalyptic visions have suggested. As I write this the northeast of the U.S. is still cleaning up after "Superstorm Sandy." This past year has been one for the record books, with many extreme weather events. Is this the new normal?

Klein suggests that even if geoengineering achieves a measure of success it may be at the expense of our relationship to nature, that potentially more intense "volcanic" sunsets, for example, might elicit less awe and more vague unease. "In the age of geoengineering, we might find ourselves confronting the end of miracles, too."



This is not from hurricane Sandy, but an "ordinary" storm over Lake Michigan about a year ago. Wondrous, yes. But perhaps a bit disquieting, too.