Other people’s words about … a beached whale

For as long as there have been humans, the whale has been a portentous animal. A whale warrants pause — be it for amazement, or for mourning. Its appearance and its disappearance are significant. On the beach, an individual whale’s [beaching and] death may not prove ‘global’ in the way of its body powering down abruptly, like a switch being flicked, but, in a different sense, the deaths of whales today are global. The decline of a sperm whale — [its belly, when dissected post-mortem,] filled with sheeting and ropes, plant-pots and hosepipes — belongs to a class of environmental threat that, over the past few decades, has become dispersed across entire ocean systems, taking on transhemispheric proportions. This whale’s body serves as an accounting of the legacies of industry and culture that have not only escaped the limits of our control, but now lie outside the range of our sensory perception, and, perhaps even more worryingly, beyond technical quantification. We struggle to understand the sprawl of our impact, but there it is, within one cavernous stomach: pollution, climate, animal welfare, wildness, commerce, the future, and the past. Inside the whale, the world.

From ‘Fathoms‘

by Rebecca Giggs

If you want to read only one book about climate change, and if you want that book to be one whose narrative ranges from the scientific to the literary to the philosophical to the emotional, and if you want it to be a book that explores metaphors and symbols right alongside facts and evidence, then Rebecca Giggs’s book is the one I’d encourage you to read. We struggle to understand the sprawl of our impact, Giggs writes of climate change. But if you read her book you will come closer to understanding.

Vista.

I’ve been quiet here on my blog recently, mostly because it’s hard to know what to say right now. The global pandemic continues. So does the climate emergency. And so, too, does my own little life, which I continue to pass by walking on the beach, by showing up to work, by writing a book that I hope one day will be published, by (maybe) moving house, and by growing older but not necessarily any wiser.

The pictures in today’s post come from a holiday I took last month in Deep Creek, a national park in the heart of the Fleurieu Peninsula. In my next post, I’ll feature more photos from the same part of the world, a part of the world so beautiful it’s hard not to feel your heart break with wonder and awe as you move through it.

Grasstree world.

Transhemispheric. That’s not a word I’ve come across before, but it’s an apt one to use if you’re trying to comprehend the size of humanity’s impact on the natural environment. I thought about that, too, while I was in Deep Creek. I thought and thought and thought.

Lately I’ve been reading …

• With each new agent, each foray into the dangerous business of hope and each corresponding bevy of rejections … I found myself shrinking a little bit more, until one day the me I thought I was had completely disappeared: David Hollander on learning to surrender your expectations (and your ego) as a writer.


• As climate change pushes rodent and sand fly habitat northward, scientists caution that in the future, an increasing number of U.S. residents could be exposed to different varieties of the flesh-eating parasite (the spread of Leishmaniasis and other flesh-eating bacteria): Agostini Petrini reminds us that Covid-19 isn’t the only contagion with zoonotic causes threatening us now and in the near future.


• When your book is on submission, there’s a pressure of silence till you know the end, a secret you keep, assuming there will be a time when you can recount the story of how it all worked out: Danielle Lazarin on hope and despair in the writing life.