news spin

I read more news at this moment in my life than ever before, and perhaps more than I ever will again. And without fail, every day as I swim through a pool of newspapers and blogs and news sites, I am blown away by what I read. Unbiased journalist? How is that possible? The more you read, the easier it is to be opinionated. Outraged, even. I may strive to make my writing fair and balanced, but that's only part of the story. Regardless of a reporter's objectivity, news outlets demonstrate their bias, conscious or not, simply by what they choose to print and report on and what they ignore or overlook.

A lack of bias is ever more pertinent now that most journalists have personal or professional blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. I try to be very clear that mine are personal, but when you're a public figure, even at a local community paper, the line between personal and professional is easily blurred. Larger (and more tech-savvy) news organizations than mine give reporters strict guidelines on how they should conduct their online presence, not only so they don't broadcast photos of themselves swilling beer and flipping off the camera, but also to discourage them from publicly voicing any sort of bias or opinion that could compromise their objectivity as a reporter.

I understand that journalists chronicle history, and that objectivity is essential to this goal. But with the explosion of blogging and social media and the gradual influx of new forms of journalism, asking reporters to maintain a completely neutral online presence is, I think, unrealistic. So -- because I'm about to leave the newspaper and head back to the outdoor industry, here are the stories that blew me out of the water this week. Maybe I'll try to make this a weekly blog posting.

1. Two commonly used pesticides have been linked to the death of bees. While it's not news that both wild and managed bees are dying in untold numbers, and it certainly shouldn't be news that the pesticides used to kill "bad" insects are also killing the ones necessary to pollinate and propagate our food crops, the study published in Science does two things.

First, it gives credible scientific backing to something that had previously only been common sense. While common sense is good enough for some organic farmers, it doesn't stand up well in court and isn't enough for policy change. To move away from the use of harmful pesticides and save our natural pollinators, we need proof that many pesticides are doing more harm than good.

Second, it shows how wrong claims of "environmentally friendly" can be, and how easily a bit of clever marketing can dupe the general public into believing such claims. The relatively new pesticides studied by the bee researchers were heralded by their developers as being more environmentally friendly than previous pesticides. When you look at it that way, I guess death by Agent Orange was friendlier than death by machine gun.

2. Dartmouth hazing scandal goes national with Janet Reitman's Rolling Stone article. This may be only interesting to me since I live here, witness the Dartmouth culture firsthand, and have been following it and reporting on it since Day 1 -- or even before than, since my in-depth piece on sexual assault at the college was published last spring. Either way, the Rolling Stone piece is a compelling read and worthwhile expose on the entitlement and desensitization to suffering that feeds directly into Wall Street culture.

3. Along the same lines: the House GOP budget. Working as a journalist has forced me to pay attention to and understand issues that I previously skimmed over, like (strangely) our national budget and the politics behind it. All I can say is, really? I must live in a fairly insular bubble, because I cannot fathom WHO would buy into a proposal to cut health and human services while maintaining tax cuts for the super-rich. I'm thankful this budget is DOA when it hits the Senate, but nonetheless discouraged that we waste so much energy arguing about non-issues like tax cuts for the wealthy, health care for women and presidential religion that we ignore the issues that really matter -- like, say, food and water security.

Which brings me to number four:

4. The EPA proposes a monumental first step in curbing greenhouse gas emissions. While this spells trouble for dirty coal plants, it also encourages the use of natural gas, which encourages fracking. Oy vey.

5. This was not a news item from the most recent week, but it's perhaps the most interesting thing I've read all month, so I thought I'd end on a high note and share this fascinating story of giant, presumed- extinct insects clinging to life on an oceanic megolith higher than the Empire State Building. Go forth into the week, and know that the world is full of wonder.

spring symphony

Allow me to state the obvious: this weather is downright strange. Not only are we soaring beyond heat records set over a century ago, we're surpassing them by some ten degrees, day after record-breaking day. Tomorrow a cold front is supposed to move in, but tonight, the sun has long set and the thermometer still reads 68 degrees and I am sitting on the stone wall outside my house with a headlamp on, amazed.

It is March 22. Four years ago during my first winter in Vermont, we got hammered with one snow storm after another in March, and my journal reveals that on this date I was snowshoeing around a frozen lake in waist-deep snow. Now, I'm sitting in sandals and a tee-shirt as the world around me crawls with new life. There's a scuffling at my feet and I catch it in the beam of my headlamp: a junebug-sized beetle. In March.

Over by the compost pile, I crouch low to the ground. There is something – many somethings – moving beneath the leaf litter. I stay very still and watch the earth come alive with movement: shifting, roiling from below as if the sea of brown leaves has become a pool of burbling lava. I pounce on a spot where there's motion but come up perplexed and empty handed, without evidence of the commotion that's stirring the leaves all around.

Finally, I figure it out: nightcrawlers, poking their blunt, blind heads from the dark earth beneath the leaves. In the garden there are hundreds of them, their mucous skin catching the beam of my headlamp as they emerge from the deep tunnels where they've spent the winter. Overhead, a bat skips across the sky like a rock across a calm pond.

And then, as the night fades from purple to black and the stars begin to emerge, a chorus of spring peepers begin to call, and, beyond, the low chattering of wood frogs like a flock of birds. The noise is a tonic, and I cannot sit still.

In the darkness, I begin to walk across this patchwork landscape. I cross the field toward the pond, where the ground is squishy. Cold water seeps through my crocs. I roll up my pant legs and continue.

At the edge of the woods where the frogs are loudest, I stop. Earlier, in the twilight, I had been feeling sorry for myself, gripped again by the loneliness that even the warmth of spring hasn't driven away. Now I am alive with the wonder and curiosity of this beautiful night, this spring air draping itself over my skin, all its creatures singing and rustling and emerging from the cold. And to think I could have so easily missed it all.

Walking on, I suddenly sink into mud up to my shins. I carefully pull my feet out of the muck and take my shoes off. The cold New England mud oozes between my toes, small rocks scraping against my winter-soft feet as they sink even deeper. And then, unexpectedly, I realize I am standing up to my knees in a pile of mud, laughing out loud under the stars as the orchestra of creatures around me fills the bare tree branches with the song of being alive.

Three signs of spring: trout lilies, frog eggs and fiddleheads (photos taken last May):

"Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own"

I love poetry all by itself, but there's nothing like setting a poem to music to give it that elusive quality that sticks to your soul. Here are some of the most beautiful poem-songs I know, but I'm sure there are so many more out there, and I would love if you shared some of yours with me.

• Railroad Earth, by Railroad Earth (Their masterpiece, it always bring tears to my eyes.)
• Angel from Montgomery (I'm actually partial to the Old Crow Medicine Show version, but the original John Prine does it for me too. Definitely not Bonnie Raitt's take.)
• The Wild Hunt, by The Tallest Man on Earth (The singer's voice is grating at first, but it grows on you.)
• Helpless, by Neil Young (I like the Unplugged version – just Neil and a piano.)
• Furr, by Blitzen Trapper (Less musically beautiful than the others, perhaps, but I'm in love with the lyrical image of a boy turning into a wolf.)
• Shine on You Crazy Diamond, by Pink Floyd (Oh, those opening chords. They remind me of sitting on a forgotten beach under a sky full of glittering diamonds.)
• Brokedown Palace or Terrapin Station (Grateful Dead, and I must specify the version from Dead Set for the former. Both examples of Robert Hunter's lyrical genius.)
• I Quit My Job, by Old Man Leudecke (For the longest time, I had this song on my playlists and didn't know who it was. Then a friend with an iPhone showed me how to magically find information related to any song just by having the phone “listen” to a clip of it. Technology amazes me.)

That's all I can think of for now. Those are the songs that make my heart sing. 

fracking 101

From the Valley News (slightly altered -- the editors removed "no fracking way" for being crass. I opted to keep it in. Also, this is a "daily" written in a few hours, so it's basically reporting on what was said on this particular evening, and isn't a well-researched, in-depth article. Not that I'm making apologies.)
 

Norwich -- For an issue that hasn't quite hit Vermont yet, fracking is nonetheless garnering a lot of attention in the Upper Valley. More than 150 people showed up at the Montshire Museum last night to learn more about the controversial practice of using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to extract natural gas from underground shale, and the general consensus was: no fracking way. Not in this state.

Though fracking has become a hot-button issue in Pennsylvania and New York, both of which lie above North America's largest natural gas deposit – the Marcellus shale – Vermont has been largely ignored by natural gas companies. A few exploratory wells were drilled in the 1980s, but currently, Vermont's relatively small natural gas supply is pumped in from Canadian wells. 

So far, anyway. State geologist Laurence Becker said in a telephone interview yesterday that the geology in northwest Vermont is very similar to that just across the border in Quebec, where large deposits of natural gas were found and wells were drilled in 2007 before the province put a temporary ban on fracking last spring to better study the issue.

“We do have the shale,” Becker said. “It's also east of Lake Champlain, close to the interstate. There's more than 4,500 feet thickness of shale.”

Still, it's unclear if Vermont's shale holds the kind of natural gas deposits that would attract commercial interests. No one has yet applied for a fracking permit through the Agency of Natural Resources, and it seems that some of Vermont's legislators would like to keep it that way – at least until environmental regulations catch up with fracking technology. The Vermont House of Representatives passed a three-year moratorium on fracking earlier this year, and the issue is now before the Senate.

New York also has enacted a temporary ban on fracking, but 27 other states, including Pennsylvania, allow it to occur, and the federal government exercises virtually no oversight in the process. The Bush administration exempted fracking from compliance with the Clean Water Act and other environmental regulations, because the drilling occurs deep below groundwater aquafers, according to presenters from Vermont Law School last night.

Proponents of fracking, like Vermont lobbyist Joe Choquette of the American Petroleum Institute, who was also interviewed by telephone, say that natural gas is a cleaner-burning fuel than oil or coal, that's it's domestically abundant and therefore cheaper than other petroleum products, and that fracking technology is becoming ever cleaner.

But Vermont Law School environmental law professor Pat Parenteau, who addressed a largely like-minded crowd at the Montshire Museum last night, said that the amount of methane emitted by fracking negates any savings in carbon dioxide emissions from burning natural gas.

Not only that, Parenteau said, but the other health and environmental impacts are equally distressing. There is evidence that fracking contaminates drinking water with methane and other chemicals, and the process itself is so water intensive that it undermines critical water supply issues, especially in the West.

The Environmental Protection Agency (which is at the tail end of a two-year fracking study) estimates that 70 to 140 billion gallons of water are used annually to fracture 35,000 wells in the U.S. To put that into perspective: that's equivalent to the annual water consumption of 40 to 80 cities, each with a population of 50,000.

To release natural gas, such vast quantities of water are mixed with sand and chemicals and piped up to 8,000 feet below the Earth's surface. Then extraordinary pressure is exerted to literally crack the geologic formations in which the gas is bound. All of the water that flows back out of the ground is ultimately contaminated, and states do not require companies to report on the levels of such water or where it is stored, Parenteau said.

In addition to water use and contamination, he added, fracking can result in earthquakes, explosions and the degradation of undeveloped land. And projections show that levels of fracking are due to increase exponentially from 2010 on.

“This is the gold rush of the 21^st century,” Parenteau said. “It's not a bridge to a new energy future, it's a bridge to nowhere.”

Though hydraulic fracturing has been around for at least 60 years, the reason for the recent boom is that new technology allows for horizontal, not just vertical, drilling, opening up new deposits to exploration, Choquette explained.

Cordelia Merritt, of Hartland, was among the 150 or so people who showed up for the discussion at the Montshire Museum – which had volunteers scrambling to set up extra chairs as a line of people streamed through the doors.

“I'm concerned about this because I have four grandchildren,” Merritt said. “I just think this is almost the most important environmental issue there is.”

Seeing

The world is full of magic things,

                                                                            patiently waiting
                                                                          for our senses to grow sharper.
                                                                         ~W.B. Yeats

I've spent years roaming this country, slowly, like a heavy rumbling engine, but my transience hasn't diminished the degree to which I value a sense of place. Rather, I think I've come to appreciate it more, because my time in any one place has been fleeting. Knowing you'll be leaving a place makes your time there more meaningful, perhaps, more poignant. More vivid.

Yet it's also true that to see a place for what it is, you usually have to spend some time there: wake up to different seasons, fall in love, drink the water, feel the soil. You must peel back the layers, get beyond the first impressions that jump out and grab hold of your senses. During the year I spent on Ebon island, half a mile wide by five miles long, I was amazed by how much more I saw with each passing week. After six months, I thought I knew every rock, insect and plant, and yet almost every day I noticed something that I'd previously overlooked. How well did the people who spent their entire lives there know the island? And if such a limited environment can produce such limitless inquiry, how can anyone, ever, truly know a city or a whole range of mountains?

At the Wildbranch Writing Workshop last year, Craig Childs told me that his job as a writer is to land in a place and physically experience it in as raw a way as possible, to tell the secrets of where he's been; to invoke that place in such a way that the reader is transported there.

Thinking back on my experience in the Marshall Islands, I wondered how that was possible. If you're only in a place for a short while, how can you discover its secrets? How can you see it clearly enough to put its essence on paper? I wrote in my journal: “I think I must train my senses to go deeper – at first, as a conscious effort when I need them to, and then all the time, until it becomes a habit, a new way of seeing the world.”

Later, a few days into the workshop, I wrote the following:

“I've now eaten at least six meals at a picnic table outside the dining area, and I just noticed the giant cobb oven twenty feet away. There must be a limit to the amount our senses can absorb at once, because it's not as if I was being unobservant. I noticed the nodding white bell flowers, the quality of the evening light, the silver bracelets on the wrist of the woman sitting across from me, the dinnertime chatter, rise and fall of voices, the way the feathery tops of ferns growing on the hillside formed tiers like terraced rice. I saw the blue sky through gaps in the branches of the spruce, the dark boughs swaying in the wind. I was engaged in good conversation. There is only so much our senses can absorb, and apparently, a cobb oven didn't make the cut. Still, I think I can train myself to notice more, and I think that once I do, I'll derive an even greater pleasure from this life. I once thought that the dissection and deconstruction of literature would detract from its beauty, rendering me unable to lose myself in it. But in fact, the opposite is true: I appreciate it and love good writing even more when it's well done. Perhaps so it is with a life of sensory fullness.”

Such powers of observation – and curiosity – can be dangerous. Autism has been described as a kind of sensory overload, and Craig, sitting at a table made of a giant slab of hammered wood, said that he could write pages and pages about something as simple as a table. Perhaps all good writers can, but that doesn't make it good writing. “Take me with a grain of salt,” Craig said. “I have to get rid of 90 percent of what I write. Writing is a process of omission.”

In jazz, they say, the most important notes are those that aren't played. In writing, perhaps some of the most important things we say are those we omit.

From my Wildbranch journal, again: “Just went for a walk in the woods barefoot as part of an assignment from Craig to focus on the sensory experience. For me, that was the cold, wet, bare earth sensing chills up my shin bones, which then inexplicably jumped to my forearms. The chill compelled me toward a sunny patch, where a moss-covered stump stood like a pedestal. If our senses tell our feet where to go, why have mine gone in the direction they have?”

In three weeks, I will be back in Alaska. 

Photo of the day:

And quote of the day (I realize that pairing the two makes this post look unfortunately like a Hallmark card, but this was written to me in an email today and it was too good not to share):

"Maybe it's the places we've chosen to live that have allowed us to be the people we've wanted to be."

A photo site I threw together with some of my favorites.  Check it out.

http://kristaleephotos.blogspot.com/