Month: January 2017

How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea (Natural Navigation)

Tristan Gooley

As I lean back in my chair, my mind leaves the apartment and takes me to the deck of a Polynesian sailing vessel. I imagine lying with my back against the hard boards, eyes shut against the tropical sun. The boat rocks and pitches to the rhythm of the waves. There are clues in that rhythm that I can use to know where I am in the midst of islands that are hundreds of miles apart. I can figure out where to go.

I read about this ancient navigation method in How To Read Water, by British writer Tristan Gooley. It is a book that reveals patterns about everything from raindrops, to rivers, to the oceans and backyard puddles.

There is something very satisfying about taking something that seems random — a meandering river, say — and learn that there are laws and patterns at work. For example: a river will not flow straight for more than 10 times its width. A river will alternate between calmer pools and agitated riffles about every time the river travels a distance of five times its own width.
The fact that these are a universal law that applies to the world over calls for some awe. Indeed, I was out for a run along a brook the other day and when I counted out riffles and pools, I was amazed to see the pattern Gooley described right before my eyes.

The experience confirmed my belief that a book worth reading is one that you can put down and then go out and see the world, even a little bit differently.

Take glitter paths. The term refers to the flashing off the waves you see with sunrise, sunset, or any other light that’s low over the water.

While the the paths are beautiful enough for most of us to take a picture, we may not notice or understand why the corridor of light often bulges outward as it approaches shore. This is because the waves get higher closer to the beach as they enter shallow water.

I had never noticed this about glitter paths, but video game developers have, and will sometimes put it in their graphics. The irony is that this concept, which many of us never recognize in real life, can add verisimilitude to a fake world.
Understanding the nature of wave patterns was a crucial part of inter-island navigation for  Polynesians who had no compasses, much less the GPS and Google Maps that ease day to day navigation for us moderns.

The waves gave them the clues they needed, ones they could read by feel, laying on their backs. To imagine how this works, picture a group of rocks in the path of a steady line of waves, the waves are going to bounce and bend around the rocks in a certain pattern. Now instead of rocks, think of islands. They too cause waves to bounce and bend, to crisscross each other in certain places. Navigators in the Marshall Islands were able to exploit this pattern and could tell where they were simply by the way the waves felt beneath the boat. It took years of training. The islanders used stick diagrams to model the way that the waves moved through the island group.

Unsurprisingly, this type of navigation is a dying art, as there are plenty of other, easier ways to get from island to island..

There are still a few who can pull off the trick, however. An excellent New York Times piece describes a modern expedition that found its way through wave navigation here:

Gooley’s book, reinforced for me that meaning and richness are intermingled with the seemingly mundane trinkets like the shape of ripples or the nature of waves. Such thoughtful observation is all the more poignant now as popular awareness of nature declines, and the virtual world — with its expertly rendered glitter paths — beckons. There is much worth learning from Gooley’s careful insight into the quiet profundity of these relationships.

The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of The Fastest Ride in History Through The Heart of The Grand Canyon 

Kevin Fedarko

Profound, which literally means deep, is definitely an appropriate word for the Grand Canyon.

Kevin Fedarko’s book The Emerald Mile, took me down below the canyon walls to the Colorado River, where it runs fast, narrow, treacherous, through monster, boat-ripping rapids. At the center of the book lies an insane quest by three dirtbag river boaters who illegally launched a fragile wooden dory at the head of the Grand Canyon during a massive, unprecedented water release from Glen Canyon Dam in 1983. The men had years of experience guiding professional boat tours in the canyon, but they knew that this time the river would be wilder and more dangerous than anything they’d ever encountered. Their goal: to set the record for the fastest decent through the 277 miles of canyon.

Like a river, the book has sections that provide high action, others that are suitable for contemplation: i.e. the history of dam building in the canyon, the demands that an expanding West place upon the watershed, a thorough explanation of the El Niño system that brought so much water down the Colorado that the structural integrity of Glen Canyon Dam itself was in doubt,

I particularly enjoyed Fedarko’s character study of the man behind the speed run, Kenton Grua, for whom the descent was less about macho oneupmanship and more about doing things right. 

Perfectionism is a common trait I’ve seen among river guides (don’t let the scraggly beards and crushed cans of PBR fool you.) This makes sense considering that many rapids will not forgive half-measures or sloppy calculation. Off the water, guides will apply the same exactitude for managing gear or making dinner. The rough edges of each operation hone down toward optimal efficiency over many trips, many seasons on the water. One guide’s idea of perfect is not necessarily the same as another’s though.

“You’re doing it wrong,” was an unofficial slogan at the raft company where I worked. As a newbie, I heard it a lot.

Therefore, Grua’s profile as “an incorrigible evangelist” and “pain in the ass,” rang true to me. Invariably, he told the other guides how they should load the boats or boil coffee in the morning. I’m sure he was annoying. His determination to do everything the best way possible also lead to amazing things.

He became the first known person to hike the length of the Grand Canyon. He had to do it right because somebody else hadn’t. The British author, Colin Fletcher wrote about his own, shorter hike within the original boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park. But the National Park was not the whole canyon, and that was a sticking point for Grua, who decided to do it to the last mile. The Grand is no mere 277 mile hike; it is a puzzle that involves knowing which shelf to walk on to avoid dead ends, finding water, and negotiating sliding talus slopes above 1,000-foot drop-offs. Grua did the whole thing.

Unlike the Brit who had irked him, Grua never bothered publicizing his achievement. “For him, it was sufficient that he had made good on his declaration that somebody needed to do it right,” Fedarko writes.

That same motivation, seemed to be what motivated him to try to set the record for fastest time through the canyon on a boat. Grua’s speed run through the Grand, was illegal but it did it right on several levels.

While he and his two buddies didn’t quite get Park Service permission for their trip, they did take the speed record away from a motorboat, validating human power over engine power.

The trip also did it right because they were taking on the river during a large dam release, and therefore experiencing what the old, untamed Colorado would have been like, before the dams went in. The damming of the Colorado is basically Original Sin for river guides and for western environmentalists like Edward Abbey. The Glen Canyon Dam didn’t just drown a canyon of unparalleled beauty, it also cheated others of the opportunity to ride rapids the way John Wesley Powell did when he led the first U.S. expeditions through the canyon.

The dam neutered the river from its once mighty heights. But when the 1983 El Niño forced the engineers at Glen to release water, the old wild Colorado reawakened and the three guides had a chance to recognize and respect the real strength of the river.

It almost cost them their lives at Crystal Rapid, where their boat flipped over on a monster wave —  “the biggest mess of whitewater that any Grand Canyon boatman, living or dead, had ever seen.” While the men thrashed inside the chaos, the nose of the dory slammed one of them right between the eyebrows.

Somehow everyone survived, and what’s more, a weary and beleaguered crew finished the run.

By riding out the river at its most violent, they set a time of of 36 hours and 38 minutes. Their non-motorized speed record would hold until this year, when several kayakers took a stab at it.

The title went to a 25-year-old Denver man named Ben Orkin who paddled a sea kayak down in 34 hours and two minutes this January. https://www.outsideonline.com/2051171/how-grand-canyon-speed-record-was-broken-twice-three-days.

I was pleased to read that Orkin also beat a motorized record from the ’90s, keeping the best canyon times in favor of human power. As the article in Outside notes, Orkin was able to set the record, even though there wasn’t the same epic amount of water coming down the river that had propelled Grua’s crew. The sea kayak moves faster in the water than a dory, though it is probably more vulnerable to capsize in whitewater.

Going back to the theme of “doing it right,” some will debate whether either of these record setting runs were noble, or foolish, vainglorious enterprise. Grua’s trip was actually illegal. Both records involved far more danger than the typical adventure down the canyon and might have triggered an expensive rescue. Like Grua, Orkin capsized in a rapid, an event that could have proven fatal.

I’m a romantic, so for me, both trips were “doing it right.” They accepted risk and hardship, and neither was obnoxiously self-promoting like many Red Bull stunts. The adventurers I respect most know that simply summiting or setting the fastest time is secondary, it’s how they do it, that interests me most of all. Adventure, like art, is an opportunity to exercise your values.

Established codes like Leave No Trace or the Ten Essentials lay out commandments for travelers to follow, but there is still plenty of room for personal judgement.

Is it better to build a small campfire or carry a gas stove? Better to carry in food on a long canoe trip or take fish from the (limited) natural environment? Is a GoPro a valuable documentation tool, or a distracting intrusion? Should the video be set to music by Jose Gonzalez or Daft Punk?

My personal code factors in carbon emissions. I will often eschew a far-flung adventure for a local one, and consider the doorstep adventure to be the best of all.

Thinking about these things (or even obsessing about them) cultivates thoughtfulness in an adventurer and adds a layer of meaning to their endeavors. Adventurers ask a lot from the wild places: they seek inspiration, purpose and to fill their hearts with beauty. The best know how important it is to give back, and that humility, that giving also becomes their reward.

The Story of Stuff 

Annie Leonard

It is a worthy goal to try and understand and respect the stories woven into rivers and canyons, but what about your smartphone’s story? Do you know the stories of the clothes you are wearing, the computer you are reading off of, the bottle you are drinking from? Do you want to know?

True, there are plenty of articles, books and documentaries that trace the origins of consumer commodities, revealing that (surprise, surprise) many of these goods arise from horrific exploitation like sweatshop labor, dangerous mines, or factories that spew toxic waste. What makes Leonard’s book rise to the top of the field is thoroughness. As a decades-long Green Peace activist, and now current head of the American branch of the organization, she has travelled around the world and witnessed the real stories behind the closeout price-tag. Often they are stories of environmental abuse, human rights violation, and exploitive development policy wherein rich countries tell poor ones how to run their economies.

On the home front, Leonard details the psychological price that consumerism has had on Americans, including more hours spent at work to keep the credit cards paid for, and less time spent enjoying family or building community.

To change those dynamics, she details ways to be a better consumer (buy less stuff and make it last) advocates for community groups and lobby the government for a policy that minimizes stuff.

To read Leonard’s book is to become skeptical of many purchases — and realize that there is always room for improvement. I used to feel virtuous for buying beer in cans instead of bottles, as cans take less energy to recycle. Leonard tweaked me here, because it turns out that manufacturing aluminum takes lots of energy and produces a lot of carbon dioxide. Recycling that aluminum also comes with a high energy cost. I haven’t bought as much beer recently.

Leonard is a big fan of bulk foods, something I try to support when I bring old oatmeal and peanut butter containers to the store to refill.

She also guns for government policy that makes corporations that make the waste pay for the disposal. Transfer stations will make you pay to throw out that old fridge with toxic coolant in its tubes, but really, shouldn’t the company that made the fridge bear the costs of disposal instead of you, the consumer? Cradle to grave responsibility is the idea. There are companies that make frivolous packages, toxic products that are next to impossible to untangle and products designed to be impossible (or damn near it) to repair. These companies should have to pay at the transfer station; not the consumer, not the city electronic waste recycling program and not the environment. If the manufacturers had to bear the costs of disposal, it would encourage them to make products that have fewer toxins, are easier to recycle, have less packaging and last longer.

She also favors more shared goods in society, such as car sharing, and the library near her home in Berkeley, that will loan out ladders and repair tools. More companies could offer to lease their goods, she believes, and there would be more incentive for them to build things to last and offer comprehensive repairs.

There is no question that such proposals swim against the tide of popular economic theory and globalization, which encourage more trade and more production. Metrics like Gross Domestic Product measure a nation’s success based on the amount of stuff it produces, with no attempt to measure the health or happiness of the population, never mind the health of the ecosystems.

Leonard castigates the World Bank and World Trade organization who have loaned money to poor countries on the condition that they knock out subsidies or tariff protections for farmers. Uprooted from the land, they go to work in urban sweatshops, making tchotchkes that find their way to the local department store.

Such policies also led to famine in Haiti, when the displacement of rice farmers  (many of whom ended up in garment factories) caused the country to depend on imports — a disastrous dependence when a drought in Australia jacked up the cost of imported rice.

The market has meant the most developed countries like America importing goods from abroad while exporting the social and environmental consequences to somewhere where there are looser regulations.

Now Trump promises to put his shoulder against this tide of commerce and bring manufacturing industries back to America. Between the backpedaling he’s made on previous promises and the billionaire cast of corporate raiders he’s picked for his cabinet, I have my doubts about this. Suppose the industries did come back, though. In that case, a hamstrung and mismanaged Trump EPA would likely allow them to start dumping sludge in the rivers and carcinogens in the air — America would start to look more like the wastelands overseas where its manufacturing happens now.

Whether or not something has a Made in China sticker or a Made in America sticker, the fact that much of what we buy ends up neglected or on the curb indicates that plenty of stuff just shouldn’t be made at all.

Advertising and consumer culture work overtime to create need, to keep the wheels turning, but this is no recipe for happiness, Leonard says. We just have to work harder to buy everything, and that means less time and energy spent on what matters.

“Relationships with family, peers, colleagues, neighbors, and community members have proven over and over to be the biggest determining factor in our happiness, once our basic needs are met,” she writes. “Yet because we’re working more than ever before to afford and maintain all this Stuff, we’re spending more time alone and less time with family, with friends, with neighbors.”

Those who try to live simple, sustainable lives must make sacrifices, but perhaps those sacrifices are not so great as the choice to live one’s life, unexamined, in endless want, roaming the aisles in search of some product to dull the dissatisfaction for a moment.

Purity: A Novel

Jonathan Franzen

One thing I admire about Jonathan Franzen’s fiction is that he is a big-picture guy. Human overpopulation is an important issues that most contemporary books  I’ve read tend to avoid, or mention in a perfunctory manner. But Franzen managed to fit that concept into a novel that wide-ranging, but also personal with his 2010 book Freedom.

Last year, he wrote Purity, which took on a similarly ambitious subject: the Internet’s power to dissolve secrecy, a theme that is all too familiar in the wake of the U.S. presidential election. Franzen also looked at authoritarian undercurrents within the Internet, where the exchange of ideas often gives way to groupthink.

The antagonist of the story, Andreas Wolf, is a figure in the mold of Assange who runs a Wikileaks-type organization exposing international scandals and corrupt governments. Despite the fact that his organization has exposed wrongdoers, Wolf does so selectively, choosing to ignore whistleblowers that give him big leads on abuses by Google and other tech companies — those are the enemies that he cannot afford to turn against. He is no idealist about the future of the Internet; rather, he sees it as an incarnation of the totalitarian East Germany where he grew up.

“If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the Internet,” Wolf thinks. “Its competing platforms were united in their ambition to define every term of your existence.”

Indeed, Facebook has surveillance powers that would have made Stalin proud. We may not have a commissar to confess to, but the phone is always on the table, waiting for the next post. Whether your online buddies are safe-space micro-aggression chroniclers or Cliven Bundy sympathizers who will tell you why their racism is not racist, you will always be aware that every view you post will be subject to their scrutiny and pressure to tell them what they want to hear.

Online publications play the same games. Selling clicks has been great business for echo chambers like The Huffington Post on the left and Breitbart on the right: the brave new media, that feed people views they already agree with.

“The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to “liberate” humanity from the tasks,” Franzen writes. “—Making things, learning things, remembering things—that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization.”

Franzen contrasts the self-aggrandizing Wolf with Tom Abberant, a dyed-in-the-wool journalist he befriends, but later seeks to destroy. Why? Because Abberant knows a dirty secret that could ruin him. The hypocrisy of someone who tells other people’s secrets, holding on to his own is damning, but hardly unexpected.

Abberant is also his rival as a standard bearer for the old guard of journalism, that his brand of leak-based news has begun to displace. Journalism in Purity, as in real life, is a dying field.

A young woman named Purity — nicknamed Pip — works for both men and sees the world through their competing visions. She is literally the younger generation in the story, awash in student loan debt and struggling to find meaningful employment. She also is determined to find out who her father is, a question that draws her to Wolf in hopes that he can find him for her. The desire to uncover secrecy motivates her, but Wolf sees this as an opportunity to mobilize her against his enemy, Abberant.

As in the spy masters of the Cold War, Wolf power is contingent on revealing his enemy’s secrets while withholding his own.

In the last decade, we have seen the Internet’s power to unmask secrets brought to bear on politicians, corporations, celebrities, on average people. This year, leaked video and leaked emails hounded the campaigns of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton respectively. Voters (including me) were more interested in what the candidates had to hide about themselves, then what they trumpeted about themselves. Discovering their secrets was more entertaining than going down a list of their policy points.

Yet, these revelations had their own agenda. I remember going to the Wikileaks website shortly after hacked emails from the Clinton campaign came out. Julian Assange had written a piece defending his decision to publicize the emails, even though this would clearly help the campaign of the most undemocratic candidate in U.S. history. Assange basically said, Hey, If I had some dirt on Trump, I’d release it, but right now, I’ve got dirt on Hillary. In other words, Wikileaks is just a neutral medium, like a pane of glass that makes no decisions about what it puts out — a lovely abdication of editorial responsibility. Too bad that Russia decided to use that outlet as a tool to advance its own agenda.

To those who believe that it is best for the media is best served as an impartial mediator between two sides, Franzen disagrees. “Filtering isn’t phoniness — it’s civilization,” he writes. Good writing is an example of an author focusing in on specific aspects of an issue. A good photograph is cropped to focus on what the photographer sees as important.

Media outlets do have the power to put information into context, and arguably that is the more important part of their job. One way the media could have thrown the hack into context would have been to highlight suspicions that the hack was Russia backed and asked why. The question gained steam after the election when it was too late to change anything. Yet the illicit thrill of finding out a secret was more newsworthy at the time.

It is tempting, but misleading, to believe that we are living in a utopian era of total information access. A look at the world today, tells me that the power to twist the information, and to continue to conceal, is more powerful than the information itself. All the reams of information in the world about Global Warming is worth nought if the likes of Donald Trump simply repeat that Global Warming is a hoax. We have no idea what his tax returns are either.

Still, the constant drip-drip-drip of information from the Internet can convince us that we are busy, that we are learning things and advancing knowledge —distracting us while the ship veers off its course and into the path of a deadly reef.

I think back to one of the ancient Marshall Islands boat navigators Tristan Gooley describes in How to Read Water.  They might have have perceived a reef beneath the surface of the water because of the way the waves felt. They did this by closing their eyes: too much information would distract them.

In the year to come, I believe that it would profit me, and many others to adopt a similar selectiveness when it comes to understanding the world. Sometimes it is better to close your eyes, so that you can think about the information you already have, instead of constantly absorbing new data and not thinking about what it means.

We have an unprecedented ability to acquire information, but sometimes it is more of a distraction than a help.