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Climate + Energy

Weekend Reading 4/19/13

Alan:

Sometimes, people ask me how I remain hopeful, given---well---everything. The answer is that action breeds hope. No, action IS hope. And action is breaking out all over the place, as Bill McKibben relates beautifully in his new Rolling Stone piece. "After decades of scant organized response to climate change, a powerful movement is quickly emerging around the country and around the world." I’ve been on a John Vaillant tear. I followed his The Golden Spruce (which I sang paeans to in February) with his intriguing story of tigers and the Russian Far East---Cascadia’s distant, dark twin across the Pacific. A more menacing, charismatic, and revealing book of nonfiction I cannot recall. It reflects not just the mirror bioregion to our own but the way big, apex predators have shaped and been shaped by humans, which it casts as the planet’s single most successful scavenger species. Most recently, touched by the bombings in Boston this week, I read Vaillant’s poignant essay on the one recorded lynching in all of Canadian history, which was perpetrated by a band of Americans who crossed into British Columbia in 1884 and hanged a Sto:lo man named Louie Sam. The tale of Louie Sam’s lynching by vile, cowardly, hate-filled men brought to mind Barry Lopez’s masterful memoir/history of racism in Oregon. In it he recounts, among other racist atrocities, the rarely discussed mass murder of Deep Creek, on the Oregon side of Hells Canyon. There, in 1887, a band of white men and boys killed in cold blood more than 30 miners of Chinese origin. As in the Sam lynching, authorities never brought any of the perpetrators to justice. To know this place, and ultimately to redeem it, we must know our history, as hate-filled as some of it is.

Anna:

This is kind of cool. A map of North America's different accents and linguistic styles. (via David Frum).

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