Considering our connections
17/03/16 05:10
I attended high school in a small town in a time when we were aware of the big wide world, but somewhat protected from it. My wife attended one of the largest high schools in our state where there were a few more options in terms of activities, organizations, and learning. Had I gone to her school, it is unlikely that I would have been in the advanced placement English track that she pursued so I probably would have had different experiences even if our schools had been the same. One thing we did share was that we had the same Shakespeare plays: one for each year of our high school careers. Romeo and Juliet is the freshman play. You get the picture. In her schooling, however, they read a Steinbeck novel each year as well. I don’t think I read anything by Steinbeck in high school. I discovered Steinbeck in her father’s library and read voraciously by borrowing books from him.
As a result there are certain gaps in my reading. I keep a list of American literature that our son got in high school by my desk. It claims to be the list of all those books every college student should have read. The list isn’t exclusively by American authors, but is a good introduction to literature for those who read all of the books. From time to time, I go down the list and choose a book that I haven’t read just to play catch up. Over the years, however, I have found that the list, while claiming to be comprehensive, is far from complete. There are a lot of other significant books that don’t appear on that list. These are books that play an important role in the history of literature, but are somehow often forgotten.
One of those “forgotten” books is Steinbeck’s “The Log from the Sea of Cortez.” I normally reserve book reviews for another section of my web site, but I’ve been reading Kevin Bailey’s “the Western Flyer,” a book about the boat that Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts used for their journey of scientific discovery and so I needed to check out the log. If you aren’t familiar with the literature, there was a fervent intellectual culture surrounding Steinbeck. Influential in his thinking were a couple of friends, Joseph Campbell, author of “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” and Ed Ricketts, owner and operator of a biological laboratory. The three planned an expedition to the Sea of Cortez in the years just before the flow of the Colorado River was completely cut off permanently altering the marine ecology of the region. The study of ecology wasn’t well known at the time and the trio envisioned their trip akin to Darwin’s expedition upon The Beagle. The actual expedition was somewhat smaller than envisioned. Campbell didn’t actually go on the trip. Steinbeck and Ricketts made the trip in a much smaller group on a much smaller boat for a much smaller amount of time. Still, they did make quite a few discoveries and added to the scientific knowledge of the region. They published their work in a volume that was at least 50% lists of the marine animals they captured and recorded. Steinbeck wrote a kind of narrative, with additions by Ricketts that provided a day by day account of the trip. There was a World War going on and the book didn’t sell very well and Steinbeck was known mostly for the novel “The Grapes of Wrath.” A decade later, Steinbeck’s publisher brought out “The Log from the Sea of Cortez,” which contained Steinbeck’s observations without those by Ricketts and a new essay on the life of Ed Ricketts by John Steinbeck. It was this latter volume that I recently read.
What is intriguing to me about the book is that it reflects long nights aboard a small ship in a remote location where the participants drank beer and talked about anything and everything. In this context, the concept of modern ecology began to emerge: the belief that everything is connected to everything else and that we exist not only as individuals, but also as members of communities. The participants speculated about how schools of fish can swim in unison and how the success of one population affects the rise an fall of another. These were big thinkers who used the opportunity to stretch their own imaginations. It reminds me of the late night conversations we used to have as theological students. We, like them, tried to put forward our theories of teleology.
Teleology is the philosophical study of the purpose or goal of something that appears in nature. Things do not merely exist, they serve a purpose. If we choose to eat chicken, then chickens aren’t just birds, they are connected to us as a source of food and strength for human living and thinking. The reason for a chicken’s existence is to provide calories for the brain that can speculate about the reason for its existence. We raised chickens when I was a youth. I’m pretty sure there isn’t enough space in those tiny brains to engage in speculation about the meaning of life. If there is to be a chicken philosophy, it must come from other creatures. We not only think about chickens, in a sense we think for chickens. Ah, but that is my speculation, not a conversation that Steinbeck engaged in with his shipmates - at least not one they recorded.
They did, however, speculate on how the various shrimps and even microorganisms of the Sea of Cortez are linked to all of human life. They observed massive Japanese factory ships that were stripping the shallow bottoms bare and discarding tons of animals in search of shrimp. They did speculate on how the diverting of the Colorado river to irrigate the farms of California were altering the ability of the sea to produce other forms of food. Eating a fresh California avocado has a direct impact on the number of shrimp available for human consumption.
The bottom line is that we are all related. As Red Green says, “We’re all in this together.” Fortunately, among us there are a few really expansive thinkers who challenge us to pause and take a look at the big picture from time to time.
As a result there are certain gaps in my reading. I keep a list of American literature that our son got in high school by my desk. It claims to be the list of all those books every college student should have read. The list isn’t exclusively by American authors, but is a good introduction to literature for those who read all of the books. From time to time, I go down the list and choose a book that I haven’t read just to play catch up. Over the years, however, I have found that the list, while claiming to be comprehensive, is far from complete. There are a lot of other significant books that don’t appear on that list. These are books that play an important role in the history of literature, but are somehow often forgotten.
One of those “forgotten” books is Steinbeck’s “The Log from the Sea of Cortez.” I normally reserve book reviews for another section of my web site, but I’ve been reading Kevin Bailey’s “the Western Flyer,” a book about the boat that Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts used for their journey of scientific discovery and so I needed to check out the log. If you aren’t familiar with the literature, there was a fervent intellectual culture surrounding Steinbeck. Influential in his thinking were a couple of friends, Joseph Campbell, author of “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” and Ed Ricketts, owner and operator of a biological laboratory. The three planned an expedition to the Sea of Cortez in the years just before the flow of the Colorado River was completely cut off permanently altering the marine ecology of the region. The study of ecology wasn’t well known at the time and the trio envisioned their trip akin to Darwin’s expedition upon The Beagle. The actual expedition was somewhat smaller than envisioned. Campbell didn’t actually go on the trip. Steinbeck and Ricketts made the trip in a much smaller group on a much smaller boat for a much smaller amount of time. Still, they did make quite a few discoveries and added to the scientific knowledge of the region. They published their work in a volume that was at least 50% lists of the marine animals they captured and recorded. Steinbeck wrote a kind of narrative, with additions by Ricketts that provided a day by day account of the trip. There was a World War going on and the book didn’t sell very well and Steinbeck was known mostly for the novel “The Grapes of Wrath.” A decade later, Steinbeck’s publisher brought out “The Log from the Sea of Cortez,” which contained Steinbeck’s observations without those by Ricketts and a new essay on the life of Ed Ricketts by John Steinbeck. It was this latter volume that I recently read.
What is intriguing to me about the book is that it reflects long nights aboard a small ship in a remote location where the participants drank beer and talked about anything and everything. In this context, the concept of modern ecology began to emerge: the belief that everything is connected to everything else and that we exist not only as individuals, but also as members of communities. The participants speculated about how schools of fish can swim in unison and how the success of one population affects the rise an fall of another. These were big thinkers who used the opportunity to stretch their own imaginations. It reminds me of the late night conversations we used to have as theological students. We, like them, tried to put forward our theories of teleology.
Teleology is the philosophical study of the purpose or goal of something that appears in nature. Things do not merely exist, they serve a purpose. If we choose to eat chicken, then chickens aren’t just birds, they are connected to us as a source of food and strength for human living and thinking. The reason for a chicken’s existence is to provide calories for the brain that can speculate about the reason for its existence. We raised chickens when I was a youth. I’m pretty sure there isn’t enough space in those tiny brains to engage in speculation about the meaning of life. If there is to be a chicken philosophy, it must come from other creatures. We not only think about chickens, in a sense we think for chickens. Ah, but that is my speculation, not a conversation that Steinbeck engaged in with his shipmates - at least not one they recorded.
They did, however, speculate on how the various shrimps and even microorganisms of the Sea of Cortez are linked to all of human life. They observed massive Japanese factory ships that were stripping the shallow bottoms bare and discarding tons of animals in search of shrimp. They did speculate on how the diverting of the Colorado river to irrigate the farms of California were altering the ability of the sea to produce other forms of food. Eating a fresh California avocado has a direct impact on the number of shrimp available for human consumption.
The bottom line is that we are all related. As Red Green says, “We’re all in this together.” Fortunately, among us there are a few really expansive thinkers who challenge us to pause and take a look at the big picture from time to time.