My New Year tree

St. Olaf magazine was looking for a photo that would illustrate the idea of philosophy and nature. Originally I'd hoped to photograph a scene of night stars, with a building of some sort tiny and low on the horizon in the foreground. I wanted to indicate a human presence, small and fragile, under the vastness of the ever-spinning cosmos. Unfortunately, the call for the image came during a long stretch of cloud cover. I went to Wild River State Park on the day of the winter solstice, hoping for some kind of inspiration, and found this lovely burr oak on one of the park's large tallgrass prairie meadows. At dusk, when the light spectrum shifts to blue, I tried a variety of several-minute-long exposures, framing myself in the image as a silhouette, above, and moving through the image with my flashlight, below. I don't know yet if either made the cut, but I loved the experiment.

Climate change vs. the rhythm of change

A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail from Dawn Adrian, a senior scientist with the non-profit Tapestry Institute and a member of the Choctaw Nation. She provided a link to her essay on the nature of the debate on climate change. She points out that the two factions arguing the loudest are both laboring under an assumption that is fallacious.

"Their arguments are based on an unspoken but crucial assumption that isn’t about present or past climate either one. It’s about future climate instead — that it should normally be expected to stay roughly the same as it is now."

Adrian goes on to show that a constant rhythm of fluctuation is the normal state of the Earth's atmosphere. Extended droughts, extended monsoons, ice-ages and hot spells come and go, retreating and advancing, one always balanced by another — eventually.

Adrian isn't arguing that we should ignore human-made climate change or that we shouldn't act to minimize the damage, but that we need to consider our place within this ebb and flow. To my mind, her essay calls on us to live with smaller footprints, less consumption and a more humble attitude toward our home.