It was my great pleasure recently to review Prairie Spring, the latest published book of one of America’s great public naturalists, Pete Dunne, for one of America’s great bird watching periodicals, Bird Watcher’s Digest. (more…)
In his superb book on the subject, Macro Photography for Gardeners and Nature Lovers, Alan Detrick strongly recommends two things for improved success in recording close-up, highly detailed images: use a tripod to steady the camera, and use a remote or cable release to prevent the minute amount of camera shake that can be caused simply by pressing the shutter release. Once I began doing both these things my macro photographs improved considerably. However, as most field photographers will likely admit, it is also sometimes possible to forego the rules, cash in a large amount of your photographic karma, and simply get lucky. (more…)
Even if only the eleventh chapter of Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson by Elizabeth J. Rosenthal was the entirety of the book, it would still be well worth the cover price. For it is in this chapter, titled “DDT, the Osprey, and the Old Lyme Offspring,” that Rosenthal recounts in exquisite detail what is all too often neglected or underplayed when the life story of Peterson is told. Fortunately, Rosenthal has chosen a somewhat unusual style for her biography of Peterson; one more thematic than strictly chronologic and from this is able to draw more focused attention to threads throughout his life that spanned years and even decades.
In truth, the recollection of the life of a person of so many great accomplishments as Peterson is by no means an easy task. Known throughout the world and elevated to eponymous stature by naturalists both professional as well as amateur, through the application of his keen mind and gifted artistic hand to the very structure of the field guide itself he revolutionized the way in which not only birds but virtually all the flora and fauna could be identified in the field. Since the original publication of A Field Guide to the Birds in 1934, through regional division and in subsequent editions, the work has to this day never been out of print. It was the model for dozens of other titles, all following the Peterson Method. When a budding naturalist, be they bird watcher, rock hound, or butterfly collector, acquires a first field guide, the odds are it will carry the Peterson name.
For most, such an accomplishment in and of itself would more than serve to stand as a monument to a life’s work. As Rosenthal clearly depicts in Birdwatcher, Peterson was not content “only” to be the originator of the modern field guide and by it the person responsible for leading untold millions into the study of the natural world. He was also a dedicated conservationist, a pioneer in the modern environmental movement, a masterful photographer, an inspired teacher, and a tireless evangelist for the personal experience of nature by all.
Yet it was Peterson’s involvement in the tragic story of chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides, known far more widely by the name of one specific form, Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane – DDT – that must never be forgotten, and in Birdwatcher is not, when the name of Peterson is mentioned. From his original, “innocent” assignment by the U.S. Army as a monitor in early experiments with the chemical through his testimony before the Ribicoff Senate subcommittee on pesticides just days after the untimely death of Rachel Carson, and onward to the eventual prohibition of the chemicals in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, Peterson was there. He was one of the few, like Carson, who suspected early on that something detrimental was happening from the indiscriminate use of these chemicals, and who worked tirelessly to establish the scientific evidence to bring about their prohibition.
Thus through Birdwatcher, the reader comes to understand that not only did Peterson provide the world with the books by which to understand nature, he was also integral in the continuing struggle to ensure that successive generations would be able to live in a world where there was still nature left to understand. This being the 100th anniversary of the birth of the “Great Man,” it is indeed fitting that his life’s work be remembered in its many-faceted brilliance; Birdwatcher plays its part well in paying to his legacy the respect it deserves.
Title: Birdwatcher: The Life of Roger Tory Peterson
Author: Elizabeth J. Rosenthal
Hardback: 437 pages
Publisher: The Lyons Press
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN-10: 1-59921-294-3
A supporting website for this work has also been established.
As the title of this site implies, I find something deep and profound in the contemplation of nature in all its myriad forms. From the time I was young, the natural world has always held both a physical as well as a metaphysical quality for me and it is in my observation of it that I find myself most freely in communion with the deepest and most profound forces of the universe. While in no way confusing the many facets of religion with the disciplines of science, I do lament the modern tendency to draw the dividing lines hard and immovable between the two realms. Deep at heart, I think every scientist stands in awe of his or her subject of study; the problem is how to express that feeling in today’s highly charged social environment without risking being considered as leaning dangerously toward those who would willfully twist science to further their own dogmatic purposes.
It is the investigation of precisely this difficulty – how to talk about faith and religion – that Krista Tippett, hostess of the public radio program Speaking of Faith, writes in her book of the same title. Ms. Tippett, a former diplomat, alumna of the Yale Divinity School, and Fulbright Scholar, is not only one of the finest journalists presently working in the field of reporting on matters of faith and religion, she is quite possibly one of the best ever to do so. Regular listeners to her weekly American Public Media radio program, amongst whom I proudly include myself, are privy to intelligent and insightful, as well as most often very personal, conversations with the world’s most influential religious and spiritual leaders and thinkers.
In the near future, I plan to produce and publish a full review of Ms. Tippett’s book, but for now, I have received permission to reprint here a selection from it. I suspect that many readers of this passage will not wait for any of my thoughts on the book but will simply obtain a copy for themselves on its own merit. I do hope you enjoy.
Peace and good bird watching.
Excerpt from the book Speaking of Faith by Krista Tippett:
In a small, captivating essay about Genesis, Creation and Fall, Dietrich Bonhoeffer described biblical stories as “ancient, magical pictures that we need alongside modern technical, conceptual pictures if we are to become wise.” In England, I began to see in these ancient, magical pictures a response to the deepest real-world confusions of my years in Berlin. I was aching with spiritual and moral questions I could scarcely articulate. I was reading mystical texts and Buddhist texts and they thrilled me. But this Bible on the bookshelf, long unopened, was the foundational text of my spiritual homeland and mother tongue.
The Bible, as I read it now, is not a catalogue of absolutes, as its champions sometimes imply. Nor is it a document of fantasy, as its critics charge. It is an ancient record of an ongoing encounter with God in the darkness as well as the light of human experience. Like all sacred texts, it employs multiple forms of language to convey truth: poetry, narrative, legend, parable, echoing imagery, wordplay, prophecy, metaphor, didactics, wisdom saying. In the Christianity of the modern West, we’ve largely left the vivid storytelling of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, in Sunday school. We’ve consigned it to the world of childhood figuratively and literally. And in our time a superficial Christian rendering of these biblical texts underpins false dichotomies that plague our public life — chasms we’ve set up between sacred text and truth, between idealized views of the way human beings should behave and the complex reality of the way they do.
But when I came back to read the biblical text after many years away, I began to love the Hebrew Bible fiercely for the fact that it tells life like it is. It has no fairy-tale heroes, only flawed, flamboyant human beings as prone to confusion as to righteousness. Like us millennia later, they had trouble reconciling the political and the private, the sexual and the societal. King David — the forefather by whom the New Testament theologians traced Jesus’ lineage — was, as the text tells it, brilliant and charismatic and passionate. He held God’s favor. David was at once a great leader and also an adulterer. He was a military hero, and yet he sent the husband of his mistress to the front lines to die. These facts about him stand together and in tension with an air of sadness in the biblical narrative. They are neither reconciled nor do they cancel each other out.
Or consider Lot, who is famous in Sunday school around the world for heeding God’s command to leave the sinful Sodomites without looking back, while his weaker-willed wife gave in to nostalgia and was turned to a pillar salt. We’ve internalized the unforgivable sins of Sodom and Gomorrah as sexual, and contemporary religious voices routinely equate private sexual sin with the moral decline of our nation. But in the Bible itself, that equation is inferred rather than stated. It states that not a single righteous person could be found among the Sodomites, and this was the reason for their destruction. There is one scene in which Sodomite men attempt to lure other men from Lot’s household out into the street with them, presumably for sexual purposes. Our hero Lot, offers his daughters instead. But in a later biblical reference and analysis of the nature of the Sodomites’ sin — one of very few — the prophet Ezekiel says that they were condemned because they had “pride, surfeit of food, prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” What if, with reference to Ezekiel, we began to understand the depravity of “sodomy” to be about a nation’s neglect of its poor?
One of my favorite characters in the Bible is also one of the most human and flawed. Jacob, the son of Isaac, the grandson of Abraham, is a quintessential late bloomer, conniver, and egoist. The Bible calls him “clay footed” and yet, through foibles and false starts, God’s beloved. He tricks his brother out of his inheritance. He later falls in with another trickster, his future father-in-law, who cons him into marrying the sister of the woman he loves. He works slavishly, marries both sisters finally, and becomes a successful man. In midlife, full of both pride and regret, Jacob heads home to face his demons and past mistakes. He makes his way across the land in which he has spent his adulthood back to the land of his childhood. His sins were great and his absence has been long, and he is terrified of what will greet him on the other side.
Jacob crosses the Jabbuk river. And in a moment cathartic for the sweep of monotheistic spiritual history to follow, he there encounters a mysterious man whom he afterward recognizes as a messenger of God or God himself. The “man” wrestles with Jacob, even putting his hip socket out of joint. Jacob wrestles back. “I will not let you go,” he tells this stranger, who turns out to be the very source of his life, “until you bless me.” At daybreak, he receives his blessing and a new name. Jacob becomes Israel — a word that suggests one who strives, or wrestles, with God.
This is a story beloved by many who have struggled with the gap between real life and religious ideas. True biblical faith expands and deepens as it incorporates mistakes, questions, catastrophes, and changes of mind and heart. Like Moses who “quarreled” with God, Jacob embodies the tense interplay of devotion and struggle at the heart of Jewish tradition. I’ve come to find in Jacob’s story a model grappling honestly and productively with sacred text itself. It is true of the entire Bible — and perhaps of any sacred text for its believers — that if you sit with these bare-bones stories, pick over them, retell them, they begin to grow — take on nuance and possibility — before your eyes. One layer of meaning is lifted and another reveals itself. You sense that the text would respond to every conceivab
le question. In other words, if I stick with these texts — if I wrestle with them and insist on a blessing — a blessing will come. The only limitation is my time, my powers of imaginative concentration, and my capacity to listen to the interpretations of others.
Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from SPEAKING OF FAITH by Krista Tippett. Copyright © Krista Tippett, 2008. ISBN 978-0-14-311318-8
After I completed reading Stephen Moss’ marvelous A Bird in the Bush; A Social History Of Birdwatching, the second thought I had (following “That was a cracking good read!”) was “It would certainly be nice if someone would write one on the history of birdwatching in America.” Finally, someone has, which is very much appreciated as I don’t have the time to do it at the moment. Look for Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding by none other than Scott Weidensaul to be published by Harcourt in September of 2007. I know I’ll be sending Luann my order this evening.
