Come joy or calamity, the world keeps on. A good thing to keep in mind.


** News of the world environment
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NEWSLETTER | FEBRUARY 12, 2021
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** Nature Has Agency
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One afternoon back in August 2017, the world went dark for two minutes and twenty seconds. At least, it did from where I stood, on a rocky outcrop in a valley of sage and ponderosa in Medicine Bow National Forest in eastern Wyoming. The sun slipped behind a black disk of a moon, the horizon flashed brilliantly with 360-degree sunset colors. And then darkness. I could hear the wind, the birds, and a few hollers from unseen campers in neighboring valleys. I let out a holler too.

Many of us in the 70-mile-wide path of totality, from Oregon to Georgia, remember the day — those few minutes in darkness — of the 2017 solar eclipse. It was an event many of us had had marked on our calendars. My wife and I drove two days from our then home in Austin, Texas, to find a campsite deep enough into public land to most fully experience the wildness of the moment. We found it in Medicine Bow.

It was a moment worthy of disconnect. I had just spent a summer covering the Texas legislature during an increasingly divided political season. The Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, a turning point for White supremacy’s move toward the mainstream, had happened days before. These were early days of a particular brand of Trump-era anxiety. And so we went out to the woods. The solar eclipse was an excuse, really.

I’m not sure why this memory came to mind this week. Perhaps I’m thinking of what’s changed since then. Four years ago, it felt like we were facing down a long road, or into a dark valley. Today, the road is still long, but fringed with a ring of silver just light enough to illuminate the damage — oil slicks on the San Francisco Bay, a trail of devastation left behind by a racist symbol on our southern border — and a path to repair it.

Or perhaps the solar eclipse, and my memory from it, evades clear meaning. Just a “small ring of light… like a ridiculous lichen up in the sky, like a perfectly still explosion,” as Annie Dillard wrote of a total eclipse 25 years earlier. “It was interesting, and lovely, and in witless motion, and it had nothing to do with anything” — just a reminder that nature has its own agency, despite how we choose to see it.

Austin Price
Contributing Editor, Earth Island Journal
Photo of 2017 Solar eclipse: Don McCrady ([link removed])


TOP STORIES ()
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Phillips 66 wants to convert its California Bay Area refinery to processing biofuels instead of fossil fuels. The rub is — processing liquid fuels from commodities based on monoculture agriculture ain’t all that green.
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For many residents of Real de Catorce, desert plants are offering sustenance during the pandemic, which has dried up revenue streams in a Mexican highlands town that is heavily reliant on tourism.
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For 16 million years, there is stone and there is wind and there is water here, at the place now called Thacker Pass. There is the drumbeat of pronghorn hooves on soil. Now that sacred silence stands the risk of being shattered by the thunder of explosives to extract lithium from this land.
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** Beloved Boomer ([link removed])
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Wisdom, the Laysan albatross, has done it again! The world’s oldest known banded wild bird hatched a new chick on February 1 at Midway Atoll. We are thrilled to report both 70-something-year-old mama and baby appear to be doing well.
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** Hamptons NIMBY ([link removed])
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Rich folks, like everyone else, want clean air and water, but just not when the infrastructure to ensure that is to be sited in their backyard. Then it’s all very fine to shed some cool $300K to fight a wind farm project. Who’da thunk it, right?
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