The World is Never Boring: Exploring The Tangled Bank with Robert Michael Pyle

Interview by Christian Martin

Robert Michael Pyle has been interpreting the natural world for readers for more than 30 years. Combining his Yale-educated scientific background, an insatiable curiosity for the world and a warm, generous personality that inspires his prose, Pyle explores the myriad ways in which nature intersects with our daily lives.

A long-time resident of Grays River in southwestern Washington, Pyle’s published work—which includes books on the natural history of the Willapa Hills, Bigfoot, butterflies, Vladimir Nabokov and his childhood in Colorado— has been recognized with two Washington State Book Awards, a National Outdoor Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing.

His latest book The Tangled Bank collects dozens of his columns from when he was a regular contributor to Orion and Orion Afield magazines. Each personable piece is a finely honed mini-essay, weaving together natural history, philosophical ruminations, travelogue, scientific facts, poetic observations and commentary on contemporary culture.

CM: Your column “The Tangled Bank” was published in 52 consecutive issues of Orion over 11 years. What were the challenges in writing such a long-standing feature with a strict format?

RMP: The biggest challenge was to learn to write concisely (750–1300 words, depending on the issue) and still write substantively, not lite, shallow or “sound-bitey.” I did enjoy it, and continue to value and employ the heavy apprenticeship in concision that it represented. But it was invariably difficult, sometimes wrenchingly so, to meet the inflexible word counts and the incessant deadlines. It seemed that no matter how long and how many drafts a column took to finish, there was always the next one due on its heels. But that's good, too, to keep you going.

CM:  How did you come up with enough topics to sustain the column?

RMP: I wrote about what most fascinated me at the time. Since I am always fascinated with something, or many things, and since my travels constantly suggest new topics, it wasn't difficult. The greater difficulty was deciding among the many possible topics. This collection of my columns concludes with a list of 52 more I'd like to write someday, including ones on waterbears, plants that grow on animals, the evolution of empathy, recycling roadkill, the history of saffron and the ontology of crocuses and “Utopia: what to leave in, what to leave out.” I could go on.

CM: Was there a unifying theme or mission that tied together the columns over the years?

RMP: Yes, the unifying theme was Darwin's contention that "it is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank...”—in other words, all of nature is interesting when closely observed. My mission was to demonstrate that the world is never boring. And, I suppose you could say, to dive as deeply as I could in one breath.

CM: It is very unusual to find natural history writing, as exemplified in these columns, in publications today, don't you think?

RMP: Yes, such writing is rare, especially with a bit of wit, which I employed when appropriate. One does see good natural history writing here and there in serials, such as Tom Titus's fine essays in the newsletter of the Eugene Natural History Society and Rod Crawford's columns on spider collecting expeditions in Scarabogram. But not a lot. Maybe there are lots of good naturalists’ blogs, but since I don't tend to read online, I don't see them. I mostly go to books, both fiction and nonfiction, and of course, poetry.

Apart from the obvious candidates we both know and love, some current writers of excellent natural history (writ large and sometimes funny) that I would endorse include Ken Lamberton, David Carroll, Julia Whitty, Jim Lynch, Charles Goodrich, Bill Yake, Seth Kantner, Carl Hiasson, Barbara Kingsolver, Henry Hughes...these are people who observe the world in all its individuating detail and bring it back in ways that delight me.

CM: Your column succeeded in connecting natural history and scientific topics to contemporary life and relevant issues.

RMP: It keeps the wide world always engaging—and therefore, ever compensatory—for the unsatisfactory qualities of the narrow world of human society. Ala Robinson Jeffers, it can help you keep your mind in maddening times. It makes life, in short, more fun.

CM: What do you do to keep the arts of traditional natural history studies alive?

RMP: I go out of doors, with my eyes, ears, and mind wide open. And then, when and if I feel like it, I write about it, in letter, journal, essay, poem, or even—if nothing else—an email. Other than that, I guess my main ways of helping to keep the practice alive are the reading and writing of books informed by the physical world; and urging the young to go afield, to seek, to read, and—if they feel so moved—to write what they find.

Photo by Benj Drummond: bdsjs.com.

Green Bookshelf

Summer books that explore the natural wonders of the planet

The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States

Mark Fiege (University of Washington Press)

Mark Fiege’s book presents a concept that is as revolutionary as it is obvious – writing history as if the natural world mattered. Much in the same way that Howard Zinn infamously recast the American story in A People’s History of the United States of America by telling it from the perspective of the underdog, Fiege takes a look at historical events so well-worn they’ve become platitudes and makes them fresh again. The Professor of History at Colorado State University does so by revisiting milestones in our nation’s history – including the Salem witch trials, cotton production and slavery in the South, the Battle of Gettysburg, the building of transcontinental railroads, the invention of the atomic bomb, the oil crisis of 1973-74 – and examining them through an environmental lens: how did the natural world shape these events? How did these events impact the natural world? What was the dialectical conversation between humankind, culture and nature that has produced the country we live in today? From sea to shining sea, America has been built upon a vast landscape bearing an abundance of natural resources and burnished with sublime beauty, but our shared chronicles often overlook these natural graces. Fiege aims to widen the scope of our storytelling for, as William Cronon explains in the Foreword, “There is nothing in the world – nothing in place or time or history – that is ever outside of nature or the environment.”

Food Grown Right, In Your Backyard: A Beginner’s Guide to Growing Crops at Home

Colin McCrate & Brad Halm (Sasquatch)

The co-founders of Seattle Urban Farm Co -- a nationally-recognized outfit that has helped hundreds of families, schools and restaurants design and implement urban gardens – share the wisdom they have accumulated over the years in this overstuffed, lively and personable tome. From vegetable profiles (when to plant, how much, container suitability, fertilizing, pests, when and how to harvest, storage and preservation) to instructions for building a wide variety of beds for all kinds of unusual urban/suburban spaces, the authors cover all the basics. There are also sections on making great compost, transplanting, mulching, dealing with disease and pests and “The Only 11 Tools You’ll Ever Need.” Illustrated with great photographs on nearly every page, it concludes with an index of useful charts, lists, calendars and other resources.

Washington’s Channeled Scablands Guide

John Soennichsen (The Mountaineers Books)

Most people heading eastward across our state – towards a concert at the Gorge, family in Spokane or the Big Sky spaces of Montana – cruise at high speeds through what seem like void of central Washington. Guidebook author and historian John Soennichsen invites us to slow down and take a closer look at these big empty spaces. The Channeled Scablands – shrub-steppe plateau terrain that has been carved out by cataclysmic floods during the Pleistocene epoch – contain coulees, potholes, slot canyons, deep lakes, erratic boulders, waterfalls, basalt buttes and other natural oddities. With the recent establishment of the Ice Age Floods National Geologic Trail and plans for visitor centers and roadside displays, John’s book is a great companion for anyone wanting to explore this overlooked but fascinating region.

Exploring Arctic Alaska's National Petroleum Reserve with Debbie Miller

Debbie Miller is on a mission. 

Having spent considerable time in the far reaches of Arctic Alaska, she’s found a wilderness wonderland that most of us have never heard of. It is a landscape of superlative natural riches — the largest herd of caribou in America, the highest concentration of grizzly bears in the Arctic, millions of nesting migratory birds, beluga whales, polar bears, walruses, salmon, spotted seals, the list goes on and on. It is, like most untouched places, under threat of resource extraction and industrialization, and that is where Miller’s mission comes in to focus: spreading the gospel about this unspoiled terrain that belongs to each and every American.

So, why haven’t most of us heard about this special place? Call it bad branding.

“The National Petroleum Reserve” is not a name that inspires wonder and awe. It sounds like the place you’d stop to fill up the gas tank on your way to the much more famous Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which lies to the east.

And yet, this reserve — larger than the state of Maine, ten times as big as Yellowstone National Park — is the largest unit of public lands in the US. Its 23 million acres are home to the largest river (Colville) and lake (Teshekpuk) in Arctic Alaska, the aforementioned riches of wildlife and migratory bird habitat, the most prolific site of dinosaur fossils of any polar region on earth and more than 10,000 years of native inhabitation and history.

It also, not surprisingly, holds oil and natural gas resources, and neighbors the 1000-square-mile industrial oil-field development of Prudhoe Bay and other North Slope complexes.

While there are designated “special areas” within the Reserve  — denoting exceptional wildlife, recreational, subsistence, historical and scenic values — not a single acre has permanent protection.

Miller’s new book On Arctic Ground: Tracking Time Through Alaska’s National PetroleumReserve aims to change that. She is traveling around the country giving multimedia presentations that combine photography, soundscapes, scientific findings and storytelling, bringing her journeys through the Reserve to life.

She hopes to win over the hearts and minds of Americans, introduce them to this hidden gem and inspire actions towards protecting the best, most profound places within the Reserve.

And it seems like Miller has the wind at her back. Her mission was boosted by late summer political developments, including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announcing the first comprehensive management plan for the Reserve that put approximately half of it off-limits to oil and gas drilling.

Still of concern is the future possibility of a new pipeline crossing the Reserve, moving oil and gas from the remote Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, where Royal Dutch Shell is attempting the first offshore drilling in the American Arctic in 15 years.

“If we listen closely, if we observe the fullness of life in this vast, wild Reserve, if we exercise restraint as consumers” Miller writes hopefully, “this great northern landscape may have a chance. When we begin to understand this big blank spot on the map, and love it, perhaps we’ll gain the wisdom to protect it.”

Artist promotes wilderness as oil companies move into the Arctic

The coldest places are ravaged by a warming world.

“I describe this as the Arctic paradox,” explorer and educator Subhankar Banerjee said. “The very thing that is devastating the Arctic—global warming—is the result of accumulation of greenhouse gases that we see from the burning of coal, oil and gas. And these are the very resources industry are entering the Arctic to extract and release.”

From his journey and journals, the photographer describes the melting and retreat of sea ice at an unprecedented pace, and the effects of that on the marine ecology. Simultaneously, and magnifying upon the effects, permafrost is melting on the land, freeing tremendous volumes of methane from primordial wetlands, accelerating the release of climate-changing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Herds and entire species perish in cycles of thaw and freeze as gales of worsening weather savage the north.

“Because conditions there are so harsh, everything grows very slowly, recovers very slowly,” Banerjee noted. “If you damage the Arctic, it takes a long time to recover. There is a tremendous provision of life there, but it is not like the tropics. It is sparse. It is delicate. We have to understand that and respect that.”

Banerjee’s interest in the Arctic took him into the high latitudes as an amateur observer with a gifted natural eye. He emerged an advocate to professionals in high places.

An engineer by training with masters degrees in physics and computer science, Banerjee came to photography late in life, but showed enough instinctual talent to put together a book soon after he abandoned his science career in full-time pursuit of his art. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land, published by The Mountaineers Books in 2003, showed the fecundity of life on the northslope of Arctic Alaska in all four seasons.

The images Banerjee collected over 14 months spent on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) were dramatic enough to also persuade the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to produce an exhibit. Things got interesting for the lowkey Seattle resident.

The Smithsonian exhibit in Washington D.C. went up just as the Senate began debating oil drilling in ANWR, a stated priority for President George W. Bush in his first term. Proponents of drilling in the wildlife refuge went to great lengths to describe the region as a lifeless void: Gail Norton, Secretary of Interior, called it, “a flat white nothingness;” Alaska Senator Ted Stevens described it as “empty… ugly…a barren…frozen wasteland.”

The Smithsonian exhibit down the street from the Capitol gave lie to these descriptions. Banerjee’s images show muskoxen, polar bears, willow ptarmigan, caribou and other creatures inhabiting their ancient niches on the snowy Arctic plains.

California Senator Barbara Boxer understood his quiet message. She held up Banerjee’s book on the Senate floor, highlighting a dramatic picture of a polar bear crossing sunlit sea ice. She recommended everyone visit the display of Banerjee’s “breathtaking” photographs.

The administrative response was disheartening. Banerjee’s work was swiftly, without notice, relocated from the main floor to a more obscure basement gallery, and his informative captions were altered or deleted altogether.

But the Smithsonian’s censorship backfired as international press coverage spread Banerjee’s Arctic photos far and wide, giving them far more exposure than they would’ve received without the political meddling of the Smithsonian. The vote to drill in ANWR failed in the Senate and the lifeways of the Pacific loon, Grizzly bear, Dall sheep, Arctic ground squirrel and buff-breasted sandpiper quietly went on. Yet national policy also went on, and energy directives advanced by Bush proliferate under Obama. These events galvanized Banerjee.

“My photographs were quiet, they touched your emotions,” he said. “Now, with the pace of change, my words must be loud.”

His new book, Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point, brings together passionate first-person narratives from more than 30 prominent activists, writers and researchers who address issues of climate change, resource extraction, environmental justice, natural history, ecology and human rights.

The Obama administration has conditionally approved Shell’s plans to drill 10 exploratory wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. Drilling in these remote areas—the first in offshore Arctic Alaskan waters—is seen as risky, especially after the traumatizing BP Deep Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Arctic Voices calls out against the effort to drill for oil in the far north.

We’ve had an unfortunate stealing of language,” Banjeree explained. “Clean energy advocates talked about reducing our dependence on foreign oil as a means to achieve that goal. This was taken up by the gas and oil industry as a reason to increase domestic extraction, to—in effect—worsen the conditions the phrase originally sought to address.

“Between oil extraction in the Arctic ocean, extractions from the Tar Sands in Alberta, shale oil and shale gas in much of the Western United States, deepwater drilling in the Gulf—and now a new emphasis on coal extraction—all of these have accelerated in recent years. They have not decreased,” he said. “Instead of taking the country to a cleaner energy future, we are taking the country into the next century and beyond into a fossil-fuel driven future.”

Obama’s U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, under the Department of the Interior, declined to pursue an environmental impact statement (EIS) for Shell’s plan to drill exploratory wells. According to the agency, there was “no evidence that the proposed action would significantly effect the quality of the human environment.”

They instead issued a Finding of No Significant Impact.

Not so fast, responded a coalition of 14environmental organizations and a coalition of native Inuit interests known as Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands (REDOIL). In a letter sent to the federal agency overseeing Shell’s drilling plans, they wrote, “The proposed activity threatens a number of significant effects, including effects to endangered Bowhead whales from drilling and ice– breaking noise, effects from a very large oil spill, and cumulative effects, and has the potential to harm subsistence activities that are of central cultural significance to Arctic coastal communities.”

The groups want a full EIS “to analyze and disclose the effects of the proposed drilling.” They maintain this is a clear requirement under the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969.

The letter also points out, “The recommendations of National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill also strongly support preparation of an EIS for Shell’s exploration plan.”

Vice Admiral Roger T. Rufe, a 34-year veteran of the U.S. Coast Guard, a former president and CEO of Ocean Conservancy, and former director of operations and planning at the Department of Homeland Security, discusses some of the risks inherent in oil drilling in this remote region:

“The Arctic Ocean has one of the harshest climates on Earth. Even in the summer, conditions are volatile, with sudden violent storms and shifting sea ice. The shoreline is sparsely populated, with no roads connecting the eight main villages to each other or to the rest of Alaska. The nearest major seaport is 1,300 nautical miles away; the nearest Coast Guard air station is 950 air miles. A spill cleanup effort could take weeks to mount and then could suffer endless delays because of foul weather.”

“Hard questions need to be asked about any oil company’s ability to mount a response to a major oil spill in hurricane-force winds, high seas, broken and shifting sea ice, subzero temperatures, and months of fog and darkness,” Marilyn Heiman, director of the Pew Environment Group’s Arctic program, told the New York Times.

“The Beaufort and Chukchi Seas are remarkable marine sanctuaries,” Banerjee writes. “They’re home to estimated 10,000 endangered Bowhead whales, estimated 3,600 to 4,600 threatened polar bears, more than 60,000 Beluga whales, Pacific walrus, three species of seals, numerous species of birds and fish, and various tiny creatures all the way down to the krill that makes much of that marine life possible.”

On May 25, 2012, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous decision upholding the Obama Administration’s permitting process, bringing Shell’s drilling plans one step closer tofruition. Further appeals are pending in federal court.

The New York Times reports, “Shell has already invested nearly $4 billion on its 10-year offshore leases and preparations for exploration in the forbidding Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Its current plan is to drill up to 10 exploratory wells in the two seas, potentially leading to production by the end of the decade.”