True as True Can Be

In our October 17 issue, Verlyn Klinkenborg writes about the ocean: “a complex overlapping and interweaving of structures, systems, forces, internal waves, and feedback loops, many of them defined by tiny variations in the salinity, temperature, or density of seawater”; the largest part of the Earth’s surface area; a metaphor for depth, mystery, and the infinite; and the origin of all life. “What life on land is,” he emphasizes, “the ocean has made possible,” and, conversely, what life on land does, the ocean must endure:

Because of climate change, ocean temperatures are rising with shocking speed. Billions of pounds of plastics and microplastics and nanoplastics…are washing into the ocean every year…. The excess carbon dioxide we so abundantly vent into the atmosphere is absorbed by seawater, lowering its pH and impeding the growth and survival of corals and shellfish. Oxygen levels are declining; hypoxic or dead zones—oxygen-deprived patches of water—may now cover over 12 million square miles, roughly as much surface area as the Arctic and Southern Oceans combined.

Since 2013 Klinkenborg has written nearly two dozen essays and reviews for The New York Review, on subjects ranging from horses, dinosaurs, and whales to farming, trees, Brian Wilson, and Wendell Berry. He was a member of The New York Times editorial board for sixteen years and is the author of six books, including Several Short Sentences About Writing and The Rural Life. In 2007 he was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He currently teaches in the English department at Yale University.

Last week I e-mailed Klinkenborg to ask him about humanity’s responsibility to the planet and the pleasures of words.

Eve Bowen: Your essay opens with a plaintive sentence from the physicist Helen Czerski—“I wish so much that I could have written an ocean book that ended with pure celebration…with nothing but a positive, exciting ocean future to look forward to”—and it closes with a grim vision of our planet “skewered like a new potato on a fork.” What’s one potentially cataclysmic outcome for humans of the damage we’re doing to the oceans? Conversely, do you see anything happening that gives you hope?

Verlyn Klinkenborg: Let’s think about the phrase “cataclysmic outcome for humans.” Should it be “cataclysmic outcome by humans?” I think so. After all, Homo sapiens has created cataclysm after cataclysm for other species—millions of other species, on land and in the sea and in the soil. To me the question is simple: Will we survive ourselves as a species or won’t we? The only meaningful threat to our species is—you guessed it—our species.

In the oceans, there isn’t just one potential cataclysm ahead, any more than there’s just one potential cataclysm for the planet as a whole. I’ve enumerated some of the oceanic threats in my essay, so I won’t list them again here. Let me put it this way: thinking of one cataclysm is a mistake. Think instead of concurrent cataclysms, for humans and by humans.

Does this sound bleak? Most of us try hard not to sound bleak, and we try to offer some sort of hope. The last line of my review sums up what I believe: “this is who we are, so far.” Hope depends not on technology but on radical, global changes in human (and industrial) behavior. How likely those changes are is a question you may want to ask yourself.

In a way, we’re all in the position expressed by a middle-aged student in a class I taught at Yale in 2016. During office hours after the election, she confessed that she’d voted for Donald Trump. When I asked why, she said, “I thought he’d change for the better once he was elected.” You couldn’t ask for a finer demonstration of what it means to hope foolishly. Perhaps humans, collectively, will change in ways that will help forestall if not prevent environmental catastrophe. It would be an astonishing step in our cultural evolution. But our hopes have to be measured against the historical evidence. We may love to think we’re a flexible, highly adaptable species, but we are, so far and in so many ways, intractable. Hope belongs to an unknowable future.

A recurring question in your piece is what it means to “understand and feel . . . in oceanic terms”—particularly when, as Czerski puts it, we’ve “built a culture based on ignoring the realities of living on a finite planet.” It’s as though there’s a form of understanding that isn’t attainable through thought alone, or through the sense of sight. Why is feeling important here? Are you suggesting that an emotional relationship with the condition of the ocean today will yield more understanding than an academic one?

An interesting question, but there’s a flawed dichotomy at the heart of it. By itself, an emotional relationship with the ocean—a phrase that needs some defining—won’t yield much knowledge of the ocean unless it’s paired with close observation, which is where science begins. But our feelings will lead us to value what we learn about the ocean—to care about it, to wonder at it, to protect it and every species it contains. This is one of Czerski’s most important points: our values guide science, which makes it essential to express and discuss and understand them. Love the ocean by all means! With all your heart! Protect it with your entire being! But don’t confuse feeling and knowing. The two work together beautifully. They’re capable of instructing each other. But not if we confuse them and what they have to tell us.

We look around this earth, and because we love to believe we’re terribly smart, terribly conscious, we also like to believe we’re fundamentally alone—that no other species shares anything more than biological rudiments with us. That false belief has allowed us—encouraged us—to be beastly to any form of life that we think matters less than we do. It ignores our profound genetic kinship with all the rest of life on Earth. My belief is well-expressed by a biologist quoted in Jackie Higgins’s brilliant book Sentient. “It is hard to get a handle on what it means to be human. We must look to the creatures with whom we share our planet to inform who we are.”

Let me be clear. This is not a metaphor. The best way to prove that? I challenge you to read Sentient without coming to a better—and surprising—understanding of the sensory parameters of our existence, the capabilities and the limits of being human, the capabilities and limits of being a self.

You write, “It seems at times as though our knowledge has been devoted mainly to expanding and accelerating the damage we so casually do to this Earth, with only our own human needs to justify it,” and you quote the oceanographer Sylvia Earle: “Just stop. Just wait.” Whether it’s billionaires exploring the deep ocean in submersibles or corporations mining manganese nodules from the abyssal plain, to what extent should humans simply stay out of the deep ocean?

This is simple. By all means, explore for the sake of science. But don’t think for a moment that the value of manganese nodules harvested for our electronic needs is in any way greater than the value of those nodules in and for themselves and the organisms that live on them. The trouble is separating exploration from exploitation. (Consider the changing reputation of Captain James Cook!) The actions of an industry that proposes to regulate itself while working completely out of sight of most humans—while purposely destroying habitats and species—can be looked at in two related ways: 1) It’s what we’ve always done, which is why we are where we are, cataclysmically speaking. 2) It has never been the right thing to do. Ever. Life always matters more. And instead of mattering less, unknown life forms—species we haven’t even discovered—matter more yet.

We keep discovering the most remarkable thing: if we cease actively destroying nature, it rebounds quickly. Some people use that as an excuse for unconscionable exploitation—nature will fix it eventually, once we’ve harvested everything of value. But that doesn’t apply to manganese nodules in the deep ocean. Every life process is slower in the deep ocean, and it took millions of years for the nodules—each of which is a habitat in itself—to form. You’d think that would create an incentive for extra care. But we know all too well how this works. The topsoil in the corn-growing regions of the Midwest took hundreds of thousands of years to develop. It’s irreplaceable. And it’s been blown away and washed down river, utterly squandered since European settlement.  Can we do better in the deep ocean? The answer to habitat and species destruction, to climate change and pollution, is always the same: stop doing the things that cause them. If we do, nature will remind us of her generosity—and remind us that a human being is no less (and no more) a part of nature than a manganese nodule lying thousands of meters below the surface of the ocean. This may seem disputable to some people. To me, it’s as true as true can be.

Your essays often teach me new words—“ichorous,” for example, which appeared in your first piece for The New York Review. It was a review of Bill McKibben’s Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, and in it you wrote: “No one who has the chance to resist will consent to live within the ichorous effluent of factory farms.” You’ve told me more than once that you don’t mind sending readers to the dictionary. Why is that?

The chance to look up a word you don’t know is a gift. It’s that simple. The way I use words you don’t know—though I don’t know you don’t know them when I use them—isn’t a way of saying, “Hey! Look at my vocabulary! See how smart I am!” It’s a way of saying, “Look what I found! Let me share it with you!” When I was young I wrote down in a notebook every unfamiliar word I came across, and I still look up unfamiliar words immediately. I didn’t do that to increase my “word power”—a sorry phrase from Reader’s Digest, a magazine my parents subscribed to—or to impress someone with my erudition. I did it because English is enormous, beautiful, complex, fascinating. Language is the most sophisticated thing humans have ever used. Why wouldn’t you want to look up a word you don’t know? It’s never ever been easier to look up the definitions of words—and their etymologies. So why not do it? Who knows what you might learn?

Writers are curators of the language. Our work helps keep language from collapsing in on itself, from becoming merely colloquial or ordinary or, like the language of business and politics, sterile and largely unmeaning. The farther back in time you read, the more surprising the English language feels, because we come upon unexpected unfamiliarities. (There’s an analogy here to my answer above. We understand who we are, as a species, by knowing as much as we can of other species. The best way to know how we write today is to look at how we used to write.) Let me give you an example. We all use the noun “reluctance” and the adjective “reluctant” and the adverb “reluctantly.” In a lovely essay from 1820 called “New Year’s Day,” Charles Lamb writes, I “reluct at the inevitable course of destiny.” You’ve never heard the word used that way before—as an active verb. But isn’t it wonderful to know that’s how it was once used? Don’t you want to use it that way again?

You’ve taught writing for many years, and there’s a passage in your book Several Short Sentences About Writing in which you make this observation: “The problem most writers face isn’t writing. It’s consciousness. Attention. Noticing.” This idea permeates your oceans essay, and really all of your work. How did you come to it?

I came upon this idea because I was having trouble becoming truly conscious of the words I was putting on the page—because I was having trouble paying the right kind of attention to the way my sentences worked—because noticing was something I needed to be doing better than I was—noticing language, noticing the world around me. As I was teaching myself to write (after finishing my dissertation—another story for another time), I kept finding words, locutions, even sentences that had snuck into my prose without my noticing. How was that possible?

And the accuracy of that passage from Several Short Sentences is proved over and over every time I teach a writing workshop. Students seriously believe they know what they’ve written, what they haven’t written, and what they’ve implied. But they’re wrong—at least at first. They’re aware of their intentions and hopes and struggles, how they feel inside, but the words are more or less left to arrange themselves almost unnoticed. The only way to improve as a writer is to improve your ability to notice, to be aware. And what happens? Not only do you become more conscious of how language works, you also become more conscious of how your mind works—and how the world around you arrays itself to be noticed. Among other things, writing is a way of practicing paying attention. Take that practice out into the world, and the way you know the world—the way you witness it—will change and change again. And perhaps it will help change the world.