Pining for Winter in New England

Roaring Brook Number 2, which deserves a better name. (Photo: Richard Conniff)

by Richard Conniff

It’s a dreary Sunday dawn here in Connecticut, 38 degrees (about 3 degrees Celsius), with rain pouring down, as it has been pouring down for much of the week. In a better world, at this time of year, that rain would have grown up to be snow and to lie for weeks two- or three-feet deep across the frozen countryside. Not now, though. It’s too warm. Like much of New England, I am yearning for winter, which hardly seems to exist hereabouts anymore. 

Last Sunday we got a brief tantalizing taste. Maybe two inches of fresh snow on the ground and the temperature just 26 degrees (-3 C) at midday. I put on my winter jacket for the first time this season and went out with my dog for a walk in the woods. It was glorious. First of all the sound of the snow underfoot, the steady heel-toe crunch of the thin layer of snow on top, and the frozen leaves below. Then the exhilarating sting of cold air on the face.

Scene of the crime (Photo: RC)

The dog led me off the trail to a fresh kill, and because of the contrast with the snow underneath, everything was plainly visible. (I was too busy keeping Jack from scoffing up the bloody remnants to examine it closely. But you can perhaps do your own forensic analysis in these photos.) I liked the reminder of other creatures, predator and prey, trying to eke out their lives here in these woods.

Things that were still among the living also left their marks, like these turkey tracks, in the snow.

Down by the stream that runs through the area, a thin memory of ice had begun to creep out from the shoreline. (See the photo at the top.) But it would go no farther. The stream runs too fast now with its load of runoff. (I was going to say snow melt, but past and future rains were more of a force.) 

The whole experience reminded me of winter hikes I used to go on 60 years ago as a boy in New Jersey’s Ramapo Mountains, tromping in galoshes with my friends through two feet of snow and pretending to be Leni Lenape Indians. My 10-year-old self would undoubtedly scoff at an old fool being thrilled by a hike through the modern, short-lived, two-inch-thick counterpart. But I was thrilled. 

Novelists Fiddle as the World Burns

One possibility: T.C. Boyle’s novel on rewilding.

Are novelists failing to confront the disastrous conservation crises of our time?  Nigel Pitman, a conservation ecologist at the Field Museum makes that case in a scathing essay just out. I think he may be neglecting Margaret Atwood, who has campaigned and written along these lines. Jonathan Franzen dealt with environmental treachery in Freedom, and many of the large recent crop of dystopian novels also seem to me to have an environmental undercurrent, as in Station Eleven, though that starts with a pandemic.

But I think Pitman is onto something here, and not just about catastrophe.  Reading older novels, I am often struck by how much more richly and knowledgeably writers incorporated the natural world into their work then.  Writers now obey the advice to “write what you know,” and what they know is not nature.  Here’s Pitman’s lead:

Novelists have a thing for catastrophe.

Something gets blown to bits—and decades later writers are still dropping by for a look, sniffing the air for cordite. The number of novels written about the Vietnam War now exceeds 3,500, which works out to about one novel for every combat platoon at the height of the conflict. The Holocaust, the Soviet purges, and the Ceausescu regime have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and some of them have done it more than once.

Shouldn’t we be baffled, then, by the empty stretch of shelf where one might reasonably expect to find a body of fiction about the greatest catastrophe of our time? These days everyone calls it climate change, but of course it’s not just the weather that has been pistol-whipped over the last 100 years. It’s everything else in the natural world as well: seafloor invertebrate communities, rare plants in Sri Lanka, the phylum Mollusca, you name it.

But if most people are aware by now of the destruction carrying on all around us, you wouldn’t know it from reading modern-day fiction. On the lists of prize-winning American novels published over the last ten years, the number with a strong environmental content — and the number written by authors who

Did a Beetle Cause 15,000 Heart Attacks?

Belvedere Drive, Toledo, Ohio, before

That’s what a new study from the U.S. Forest Service suggests.  Here’s the press release:

“Evidence is increasing from multiple scientific fields that exposure to the natural environment can improve human health.  In a new study by the U.S. Forest Service, the presence of trees was associated with human health.

“For Geoffrey Donovan, a research forester at the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station, and his colleagues, the loss of 100 million trees in the eastern and midwestern United States was an unprecedented opportunity to study the impact of a major change in the natural environment on human health.

And after. (Photos: Dan Herms)

 

 

 

 

In an analysis of 18 years of data from 1,296 counties in 15 states, researchers found that Americans living in areas infested by the emerald ash borer, a beetle that kills ash trees, suffered from an additional 15,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease and 6,000 more deaths from