photography | The Casual Blog

August 30, 2022

Processing Tanzania animals and travel

Baboons in Tarangire National Park, Tanzania

I’m still working my way through my photos from Tanzania, and processing impressions from the trip. We saw a lot of animals! In some situations, I took dozens of pictures, and it’s tough to decide which is my final favorite.

Anyhow, here are a few current favorites. What I was looking for was more than just the beauty and strangeness of the animals. The trip helped me appreciate better that their lives are part of complex relationships with their fellow creatures and their environments.

But the much bigger point is Tanzania is a fascinating place. Getting there from the U.S. is hard on a body, at least if you’re not in an ultra high-end airline seat/bed. It took us about 36 hours from airport to airport each way. We flew on Qatar Airways, which treated us better than our recent U.S. carriers. It had planes with seats that didn’t seem specially engineered to torture you and flight attendants who seemed to view their job as helping passengers.

An impala — a delicate, speedy creature that loves grass

On long flights, I’m usually not able to sleep much, but I look forward to having extra time for reading. There comes a point, though, even for a big reader like me, when the eyes and mind get too tired for reading. Instead, recently, on planes equipped with individual screens, I watch movies. I try to pick ones that Sally probably wouldn’t be interested in, and ones that haven’t made my must-see list. The point is to achieve a state of mild engagement/distraction – enough so as not think about how many more hours before I can get off the plane.

Cape buffalo — a stolid creature that also loves grass

Part of the point of Qatar Airways seems to be to raise the profile of that little country and get international travelers into its hub airport at Doha. We had long layovers there going and coming, and it was impressive, in a post-modern way. Even in the middle of the night, shops, restaurants, and bars were open, and the assemblage of luxury goods stores (handbags, watches, jewelry, clothing, luggage) reminded me of Fifth Avenue, or Zermott. We were a bit confused about the value of the local currency, and so managed to set a new high-end record for an airport meal in their Italian restaurant.

We also had a long layover in London’s Heathrow airport on the way home. There had recently been reports about Heathrow’s poor operations in handling passengers and baggage, but we had no special problems, other than a very slow line at a coffee shop.

One thing I confirmed coming back was that it’s definitely worthwhile on long trips to wear compression socks. I’d worn a pair on the way over, but mine were among the items lost when our tent at Serian Serengeti North was blown away. Regular socks just didn’t cut it. When I got back to Raleigh, my ankles had swollen dramatically, and were very sore. For my next trip, I got a replacement set from an outfit called Vim and Vigr.

As to that storm: we were out late in the day on the savannah close to the Kenya border watching a pair of lions, which seemed to be considering whether to take another nap or go for a hunt. We had great close views, but the cats weren’t doing much. As the sun started to set, huge dark clouds rolled in, and we started the long drive back to camp.

A few minutes later came the first drops of a deluge. Our guides unfolded the canvas top and plastic windows of the 4Runner and put up the windshield. Visibility quickly dropped to near zero, while the winds picked up. Then we began to have lightning flashes and thunder close by every few seconds. Our driver asked if I thought it was OK to stop, and I said I saw no other choice. It looked entirely possible that we would not be able to make it back to camp that night.

Not long after, visibility improved enough to move forward, and our driver managed to get us through some creeks that had gotten a lot deeper since the earlier crossing. We came across a vehicle that was stuck in the mud, and tried unsuccessfully to push them out of their rut. Finally we got back to the camp. We were happy to be there, but everyone else was in a state of high anxiety, trying to figure out how much of the camp had been destroyed.

Alex Walker and his dedicated team managed to feed us a satisfying hot meal in one of the two remaining dining tents, and worked through the night assessing damage and starting repairs. Our tent had been flooded and blown away, but most of our possessions were eventually found. The staff worked hard cleaning and drying things while we were out on our last game drive the following day.

Of course, it’s always good to get home. We’ve been watching some documentaries this week, and I wanted to particularly recommend one: Eating Our Way to Extinction. It’s a powerful summary of the problems with our animal agriculture system, and especially the part it plays in climate change. The presentation is upbeat, with narration by Kate Winslett and cameos by several celebrities. It emphasizes that it is not too late to change the system, and we as individuals can help.

Thompson’s gazelle — also a speedy grass lover

One last thing: I read a good book on the trip: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. In my teens and twenties I made a point of reading quite a few officially recognized “classics,” which may or may not have been the best use of my time. In any case, Grapes is one that I never got to, and I came to it without a lot of assumptions.

The book tells the story of a poor farm family forced from their farm in Oklahoma and hoping for a new life in California. Their story is both specific (each character is an individual) and general (there are many thousands in their predicament). I was pulled along by the classic story telling, but also got a better understanding of the economic and social forces that created their desperate poverty along with dramatic wealth for a few.

I was surprised at how timely the book seemed, as climate change and political upheaval unleashes enormous migration around the globe. Steinbeck helps us process these kinds of forces, and encourages us to show compassion and work on solutions.

August 13, 2022

Our safari in Tanzania

We returned last week from a 10-day safari in Tanzania, where we visited Tarangire National Park and Serengeti National Park. It was a long hard trip there and back, but completely worth it. We met some interesting people, but the highlights were the non-human animals living their lives on the savannah.

We saw many elephants, gazelles, giraffes, buffalo, zebras, baboons, monkeys, ostriches, hippopotamuses, crocodiles, and many, many wildebeests, as well as a few jackals, hyenas, lions, leopards, and cheetahs. There were also many colorful birds, small mammals, unusual speedy antelopes, and reptiles.

Some of the oldest known human fossils come from east Africa, and our species spent a lot of its pathbreaking years there. It’s a big but underappreciated part of our story. Looking out over vast grasslands, I found myself thinking of the tall grass differently: vital food for many creatures, and hiding places and ambush spots for some.

The Serengeti was the setting for the Lion King, which I thought was a sweet and touching movie, though I had assumed it had a large dose of romantic fantasy in depicting the animals and landscape. It seemed unlikely that different species of animals would live close together cooperatively and mostly peacefully.

But in fact, we saw a lot of different species sharing territories, some warily but others relaxed. In most if not all herds, there were animals of different ages, including young ones. The young animals played while their mothers kept a watchful eye.

We saw large groups of animals organize themselves quite efficiently for travel, rest, and eating, though how they do it is still largely unknown. One of the most amazing spectacles was the wildebeests crossing the Mara River as part of their annual migration. We saw nine or ten of these crossings in which thousands of the creatures plunged down steep embankment, swam the river, and climbed the bank on the other side near us. Most were successful, though we saw crocodiles get a few.

According to Seni, our guide, who knew a lot about animal biology and behavior, wildebeests aren’t particularly smart or athletic by Serengeti standards, and some people consider them ugly. Apart from their dramatic migration, their lives seem to be mostly about eating grass, avoiding predators, and reproducing. We know little about how they communicate and organize to get things done. But their huge numbers show that they do so, and their strategy appears to be successful.

The animals of Tanzania have some of the same problems we do, like rising temperatures, droughts, storms, and fires caused by global warming. They get diseases or get caught by powerful predators, not to mention human poachers. But I was struck and moved by how well so many of these creatures do when we just leave them alone. In Tanzania’s huge national parks, they have territories and healthy habitats, and seem to be living mostly peacefully and doing as they like.

When I was a schoolboy, we were taught that animals operate mostly on raw instinct, and don’t have anything similar to our mental processes for memory and planning, or even feeling. There’s more and more evidence that this is far from true, and that many animals have strong memories, the ability to plan ahead, and emotions.

The Washington Post had a fascinating piece this week by Lars Chittka on the consciousness of bees. Chittka’s researchers found that individual bees could remember human faces, count, and use tools, and that they experienced positive and negative emotions. It makes one wonder, how much more is there yet to learn about animals’ abilities and consciousness?

We’ve been thoroughly socialized to avoid thinking about animals as agents having coherent lives worthy of respect. Most of our education on animals just ignores the complexity and successes of their social systems (their families, herds, alliances), political systems (territories, cooperatives, group decision making, conflict resolution), and creative achievements (communication, nourishment, transportation, sports, shelter).

We’ve long assumed that humans and their systems are separate from and superior to all non-humans and their systems. This is, of course, self-serving, and also less and less persuasive in light of modern research. The massive destruction wrought by humans on the rest of the earth over the last few centuries calls such thinking into question: our species has been the main driver of our grave crises. Yet even in the face of the human onslaught, many animals carry on with their cultures. We can learn from them, and should.

For the trip, I brought along my new Nikon mirrorless camera and three lenses, one of which (the long one, 150-600 mm) malfunctioned on the first day. Still, I took a lot of pictures, and I’m still not finished with the first pass through them. But I wanted to go ahead and share a few that I thought reflected some of the beauty of Tanzanian animals’ lives. I’m hoping to write more next week on the experience and share more images.

November 21, 2021

Things to be thankful for: red rocks, animal cultures, and leaving Afghanistan

I took these pictures a couple of weeks ago in the Four Corners area, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah come together. With a group of photographers led by a master photographer, Joe Brady, I explored Monument Valley, the Valley of the Gods, Goosenecks State Park, Mesa Verde, and other remarkable areas. We didn’t see much wildlife, but there were epic rocks and scraggly plants that manage to survive in the red rocky desert.

But animals were on my mind, as I finished reading Carl Safina’s new book Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. The book has three main sections concentrating on species we may feel like we know something about: sperm whales, scarlet macaws, and chimpanzees.

Safina shows the beauty and intelligence of these creatures, and provides a window into their complex social lives. “Animal culture” is not a well-settled concept, but Safina demonstrates that these species all have developed elaborate systems that they use to regulate their social lives and teach to their young. He thinks we can learn from them.

Apropos of lessons that might be learned, I also finished reading Craig Whitlock’s new book, The Afghanistan Papers. The book is largely based on a secret U.S. government study regarding what went wrong in our longest war. In the study and in later interviews, various generals, civilian defense officials, diplomats, and soldiers described what they experienced, and what conclusions they drew.

I took away two main points. First, the U.S. government lied over and over about what was happening in Afghanistan. Generals and presidents alike kept saying that the situation was improving, that we were turning the corner, and we would win. However, from early on, the situation in most of the country was a hopeless quagmire, and those with the relevant information knew it.

Second, and even more disturbing: almost no one involved in making decisions about U.S. policy in Afghanistan knew or cared to know much about the country’s history, politics, and culture. Those in charge reduced the situation to simple black and white — good guys and bad guys — and vaguely imagined that success consisted of removing the designated bad guys.

The long American tradition of seeing violence as an all-purpose solution, rather than a deep problem, accounts for some of the tragedy of our misadventure in Afghanistan. Our cultural blinders contributed to our collective self-deception, and extended it over two decades.

Even now, it appears that many people know nothing about how we worsened the violence and corruption in Afghanistan, and think we should have stayed the course for additional decades. It is ironic and disturbing that an act of true political courage by President Biden — confronting our entrenched collective delusion and stopping our part of the war — has few defenders.

With so many pressing political and social issues at hand, it’s unlikely we’ll have a quiet period of collective reexamination of lessons to be learned from our Afghanistan mistakes. We may never get to a remorseful pledge to never again inflict so much death and chaos on another unfortunate country. But hope springs eternal, and so I recommend Whitlock’s book, which is quite readable. Here are some other thought-provoking recent articles with useful perspectives on the disaster:

Michael Massig in the New York Review of Books: The Story the Media Missed in Afghanistan. Massig points up the role that a compliant mainstream media played in creating the widespread delusion that the war was worthwhile and successful.

Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books: The Lie of Nation Building. As part of a review of Whitlock’s book, O’Toole argues that the Afghanistan experience was a dark mirror showing deep flaws in American democracy. The trillions of U.S. dollars spent on the war created new frontiers of kleptocracy and corruption in Afghanistan, not to mention new fortunes in the American military-industrial complex. O’Toole doesn’t go into all this, perhaps because it’s obvious: this wasteful disposal of mountains of taxpayer money also meant lost opportunities for addressing American inequalities and improving our healthcare, education, transportation, and other systems.

Anand Gopal in The New Yorker: The Other Afghan Women. In this extraordinary piece, Gopal takes us into the world of some rural Afghan women, including those who found the brutality they experienced from the Taliban less abhorrent than the brutality of the local warlords who the U.S. brought on as proxies.

June 7, 2020

Views of the big anti-racism protests, and getting close to some bears

A black bear last week in eastern North Carolina

It’s been almost two weeks since the first peaceful protests in downtown Raleigh, followed by not-so-peaceful protests, vandalism, and looting. In our city and many others, people gathered in the streets in opposition to police killings of unarmed Black men. The crowds shouted in unison, Black lives matter! And No justice, no peace!

Late in the night, some of the demonstrators started throwing bricks through the big plate glass windows and grabbing the cash registers and goods from the shops. There were some small fires. It looked like our city could be in big trouble.

The protests were not far from where we lived. Our building’s management boarded up the ground-level windows the next day, and a lot of area merchants and residences did likewise. But it seems like the demonstrators had second thoughts about the destruction. The protests continued the next day, with marchers with signs, shouting, and drumming, but without the vandalism and looting.

There have been thousands of people here and around the world peacefully protesting police violence and other anti-Black discrimination. It’s not surprising that Black people are protesting. They’ve lived with these problems and related ones for a long time. It’s good that they’ve found the courage and purpose to organize, and good that non-Black people are joining in. The movement is helping white people to see the reality of our caste system that subordinates and oppresses Black people.

Our racist system, and the background folk ideology that sustains it, took a long time to construct, and it will take time to deconstruct. But it feels like we may be moving in the right direction, and with any luck we’ll keep moving that way.

What to say about vandalism and looting? Obviously, it’s not as bad as the police violence and killing of innocent Black people. Some of the vandalism likely comes out of anger, with inadequate legal outlets for that anger. In many places, Black voting has been suppressed, so ordinary political expression is not available, and other methods of communicating are too expensive. I can understand why anger and frustration make throwing a brick through a plate glass window seem like the only available way of getting attention. And breaking glass and lighting fires certainly does get the attention of the power structure and the media.

The problem is that property damage and theft also align with the traditional racist narrative that Black people are dangerous and must be controlled, with violence if necessary. Property destruction is an understandable emotional outlet, but it is ambiguous as communication. It creates a space for new police violence and disruption of lives by the criminal justice system. Also, looting may just be a way to get things without paying for them, which is nothing to be proud about.

So, my recommendation is to stop breaking glass and looting, but keep shouting for change. I really admire the courage of the protesters. I took on board the message that the Covid-19 virus is dangerous and requires that we not get too close together, and as far as I know that’s still true, so I haven’t been marching. Also, I’m fearful of getting tear gassed and clubbed by police. There have been a few stories of police expressing compassion, but a lot more about brutal police attacks on non-violent protesters.

That’s something else that needs to change. I feel concern for the police, who in the best of times have a tough, dangerous job. There are probably many police officers who resist and oppose anti-Black racism, but there are clearly some who don’t. Police violence against Black people is endemic. It has to stop.

There was a heartening essay in the Washington Post today by Patrick Skinner, a police officer in Savannah. He noted that police training fosters a mind set of being a warrior, with citizens as the enemy. He described his own experiment with a different approach to policing. The key idea was to approach the people in the community he served as neighbors, and try to help his neighbors. In his experience, it lowered the risk of violence and increased the possibilities for peaceful resolutions. It sounded like a great idea!

But as I say, this is a good time for non-Black people to learn more about the Black experience and our caste system. I was pleased to see that three books I found really helpful on this subject are near the top of the New York Times Best Seller list: White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo, How to Be an Anti-Racist, by Ibram Kendi, and The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander. I continue to recommend them.

I got to spend some time last week in eastern North Carolina at the Alligator River Wildlife Refuge and the Pocosin Lakes Refuge. I was there as part of a wildlife photography trip led by master photographer Mark Buckler. This area is said to have the largest concentration of black bears on the planet, and we were hoping to see bears.

There were a lot of them. We saw mothers with cubs, frolicking yearlings, and males courting females. We saw bears of various ages walking, running, eating, playing, and resting. A couple of the bears looked like they had been injured, but most seemed to be well fed and healthy. It was moving to be with these beautiful and resourceful creatures.

From what I learned, the popular myth that bears are normally fierce and apt to attack humans is way off the mark. They are normally wary of humans and busy with their own concerns. They are, of course, wild animals, wary and not entirely predictable, and they are definitely capable of attacking humans who threaten them.

But we saw no aggressive behavior. Some of the bears we saw were shy and kept a good distance, but a few let us get pretty close and stay for quite a while. Of course, we kept a sharp eye and ear out for signals of discontent, like grunting, growling, or slapping the ground, and frequently updated our possible exit strategies.

There were also some less beautiful creatures, including opossums and biting insects that left me with some extremely miserable itching wounds on my legs. Some of these seemed to be chiggers. But there were different looks to the wounds: some bites became blisters, some became hard, and other were oozy. Wonder if they bite bears?

December 15, 2019

New bird views, meditating for health, and the Trumpian take on liberals

With the chilly and rainy weather this week, I didn’t get out for any nature photography. I missed seeing the birds, but was glad to have some extra time to experiment with photo processing. I’ve been improving my Lightroom and Photoshop skills, and learning how to use Nik, Topaz, and Luminar software. Along with various failures and frustrations, I’ve discovered some new possibilities.

These images are revisions of recent shots. When I first made them, I was excited to be able to see details that were generally invisible to the human eye. Looking at them again reminded me of the joy of just looking at the birds and sharing their world. Trying out new software tools to the images made me look at the animals in new ways.

Like most everyone, I generally think of reality as fixed and solid, though I also try to keep in mind that there are other ways to think about it. Along that line, I’m currently reading Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, by Sean Carroll. Carroll is a research professor of theoretical physics at CalTech. He gives a lively account of the main ideas of quantum theory, including the mind-bending oddities, such as entanglement (particles affecting the behavior of distant particles).

For all its remarkable theoretical and practical achievements, Carroll admits that quantum physics is incomplete, lacking in a broadly accepted paradigm. He is supportive of the Many Worlds theory, which holds that the best explanation of quantum phenomena is that our universe is only one of a great many. I’d thought that Many Worlds was some sort of game for deep science nerds, but he convinced me that it’s more than that.

More research is required. Anyway, along with our enormous universe, there could be many others, some with beings like us that we can never communicate with. That seems less farfetched after experiencing the polarization of US politics, and most recently the Trump impeachment hearings.

Watching Republican legislators last week was, for me, surreal. Asked to address hard evidence that Trump had acted in direct opposition to US policy on Ukraine in order to benefit himself, they tried various maneuvers, including objecting to procedures, talking about conspiracies, and babbling and shouting incoherently — seemingly anything to avoid the issue.

I couldn’t watch for long — it was just too painful. But I saw enough to conclude that these Republicans had very strong feelings. They were very emotional. I had been assuming that they were cynical hypocrites, with little regard for the public interest or much of anything other than their own selfish interests.

But their anger seemed sincere. So I decided to work with the assumption that they sincerely believed that Trump had done nothing wrong and was the victim of an evil witch hunt by liberals. I wondered how, in spite of a mountain of evidence pointing in the opposite direction, such a belief could arise.

Part of the story is surely Trump’s attacks on the mainstream press. By calling every report that is unfavorable to him “fake news,” Trump seems to have thought that he could create doubt and confusion about facts that were otherwise uncontested. And, amazingly, he may have been right.

I originally assumed that no thinking person would buy the fake news idea. After all, Trump has such a long record of compulsive lying on matters large and small that the most reasonable assumption about his latest statement is that it is false. He also reflexively resorts to the schoolkid move of flipping any attack, as in, “You can’t say I’m a bully — you’re the bully!” As his preferred “news” organ, Fox News, beams out praise for him and attacks on his opponents without regard to reality, it makes a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland sense that he’d call all other news “fake.”

The traditional media has struggled to survive in an online world, with newspapers closing left and right. But other than the Trumpian claims, there’s no reason to think that our long established and respected media organs, like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, have switched from their traditional business of reporting on actual events in a relatively balanced way to just making things up. The charge of fakeness generally comes with no back up evidence or proposed corrections. But the claim of “fake news” seems to really resonate with Republicans.

Why? I have some ideas. First, there’s the information bubble. Our online world has made it easy to surround oneself entirely with information sources that fit one’s own preferences and biases, and avoid any contrary information. Fox News has been a trailblazer in the dark art of stylish disinformation, while Facebook, Twitter, and others have enabled the creation of alternative realities.

At the same time, human thought processes are far from reliable. Our brains are generally subject to confirmation bias, which makes us tend to believe what fits with our prior beliefs. We avoid cognitive dissonance, or information that calls into question those beliefs. We are prone to mistakes based on our likes and dislikes. We’re also inclined to think whatever the tribe says we should think. Even with the calmest, most rational among us are subject to these tendencies.

And Trumpism does not encourage calmness and rationality. It encourages fear and anger. Trumpism sounds the alarm as to various non-existent threats that are declared to be dire: hordes of brown-skinned people invading across the southern border so they can rape and pillage and take over jobs, minorities that are predominantly criminals, child molesting gays, secularists destroying traditional religion, Jews, etc.

But the most dire, most hated threat in the Trumpian universe is liberals. This is so bizarre that it took a long time for liberals to see it. Liberals thought they were engaged in ordinary life and politics, in which having diverse views was normal. That is, liberals thought of themselves as normal people, and of Trumpian Republicans as basically normal people who just disagreed with them. Liberals assumed the feeling was mutual.

That turned out to be wrong. In the Trumpian world view, liberals are not just ordinary political opponents. They are a threat to the social order and basic values. They are subhuman animals. They are evil.

As Michelle Goldberg recently pointed out in a good op ed piece, Trump treats liberals as “the enemy” and subjects them to a constant barrage of dehumanizing propaganda. Liberals are “scum.” Repetition and amplification by Fox News and its allies fills the Trumpians’ information bubble.

So the Republican legislators’ recent behavior — the lies, the insults, the shouting — probably seems to them well justified. Fearful for their careers and their tribe, they feel that they’re under violent attack and must defend themselves. For them, facts that implicate Trump are ipso facto just “fake news.” Those who say otherwise are evil liberals.

When we get excited or scared, it’s much harder to think reasonably and to be our best selves. This is one of the reasons I spend some time every day doing mindfulness meditation. It settles me down emotionally. It also helps in understanding more about how the mind works, and recognizing that it is just the mind. For a timer, I use a free app called Insight Timer, which also has a collection of good instructive talks. I’ve also benefited from the guided meditations from an app called Calm.

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October 7, 2019

Beautiful birds

Great blue heron at Shelley Lake

It took me a long time, but I finally faced a tough fact: if you really want to see wildlife around here, you have to get up when it’s still dark. I adjusted my routine recently, and instead of starting the day with a gym work out, I’ve been grabbing my camera bag and tripod and pushing up to one of Raleigh’s parks.

Canada geese coming in low

Shelley Lake has been my primary target these last couple of weeks. I’ve been watching squadrons of Canada geese and mallards practicing their flying, while I try to figure out how to catch them in the early light. From time to time, a great blue heron or great egret scoots by. I heard a report of a bald eagle there last week, but haven’t yet seen it.

Great egret

There are a lot of smaller birds, which I know mostly from listening rather than seeing, since they are masters at concealing themselves in the leaves. A few years back I put some effort into learning some birds’ songs, and with the fall migration coming soon, I’ve been refreshing on that skill. There are several apps I’ve found helpful, including ones from Audubon, Cornell, and Merlin.

The more I listen, the more I realize: the birds are communicating. That is, they aren’t mechanically repeating a programmed sequence; they’re sending out messages. Ornithologists have ideas about some of the messages, like alarm calls, but we’ve still got a lot to learn about their systems.

Being a bird cannot be easy. There’s always competition from other birds, and killer predators, like hawks and cats, can come out of nowhere. And then there’s the problem of human activity.

Killdeer

I was saddened, but not really surprised, at the report last month that bird populations had dropped precipitously in the last 50 years. In North America, there are 29 percent fewer birds, or almost 3 billion less than there were. That’s a lot of dead birds! The reasons are complex, but ultimately they have to do with us — our destruction of habitats, our use of pesticides, and of course, the environmental changes related to our irresponsible use of fossil fuels. All this bird destruction is terrible for the birds, obviously, but also for us and other creatures. Birds are important parts of ecosystems, spreading seeds, controlling pests, and pollinating plants. And of course, they’re beautiful. So, another wake up call to change course.

Young deer

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July 23, 2019

The beautiful Blue Ridge, and our racism, continued

Blue Ridge-0103

Last week I went to the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina, where I took a photography workshop with Les and Janet Saucier. The main subject was macro photography, and we shot a lot of wildflowers. We also did some vistas off the Parkway and a particularly gorgeous waterfall called Eastatoe. I was standing in ankle deep in chilly water for my waterfall shots, and it was totally worth it.

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Les and Janet were good teachers. Les had a kind of zen master vibe — not saying too much, but somehow making us look and think harder. We shot in some tough conditions at times, including rain and wind, which Les encouraged us to appreciate as opportunities for new perspectives.

To find macro subjects, he advised that we pay attention to what caught our eye and made us feel something. This mapped well onto my mindfulness meditation practice, part of which involves learning to pay better attention to what’s going on in your head and heart.

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I did one hike on my own from the Parkway up to the top of Mount Pisgah. It turned out to be steeper and longer than expected, and I was in quite a lather when I got to the top. There was a good view of the mountains and valleys, as well as a plug ugly communications equipment tower.

Just as I started back down the trail, I heard a loud thunder clap, and soon after it started to rain. I’d brought my trusty Nikon D850 camera, but no rain gear, and I was very worried that the camera would get damaged. I put it under my sweaty tee shirt and scurried downward. Fortunately, it didn’t rain too hard, and my beloved D850 weathered the storm.

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Along with a lot of natural beauty, from our beaches to our mountains, North Carolina has some old and stubborn problems. While I was at the workshop in Brevard, Trump held a rally in Greenville, NC, where the ralliers chanted “Send her back.” The code wasn’t hard to decipher: they were saying this country is for white people, and minorities and women who get uppity will not be tolerated. This is ugly, ignorant, and sad, but also interesting. It could serve as a kind of an acid test for just how racist a country we are now.

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Jamelle Bouie wrote a perceptive essay in the NY Times about how our racial caste system has historically used public violence, including lynchings, to intimidate minorities, which at the same time reinforces the concept of white supremacy. Trump’s rallies aren’t lynchings, of course, but the threat of violence at his rallies keeps getting more obvious. Bouie highlights how such raucous gatherings not only scare minorities but also build a sense of white supremacist community. For these folks, expressing high intensity hate involves ecstatic joy, as the crowd feels united against the Other and reaffirmed in their traditional white identity.

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This is pathetic and ignorant, but it’s exciting, at least for a particular subpopulation. Trump appears to have made a judgment that scapegoating minorities with raucous circuses will distract from his personal and policy shortcomings, like his incompetence, dishonesty, cruelty, and corruption; his failure to deliver on most of his promised domestic programs; his stupid and dangerous blundering in international relations; and his driving us headlong towards environmental catastrophe.

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Here in North Carolina, there’s no denying that we’ve got some 100-proof racists, who truly hate black people, and who believe that white people are both superior and wronged victims. We’ve also got a lot of people who are appalled at such notions and are committed to the values of tolerance, diversity, and equality. And there are many people, including some of us who support racial justice, who also carry around a strain of subtle racism that they don’t even realize they’ve got.

American racism is part of the air we breathe, and those accustomed to white privilege can go for periods without even noticing it. One good thing about Trump and his true believers is that their bold expressions of hate make it harder to ignore. They should make us less complacent, and inspire us to be more honest in recognizing and fixing our own prejudices. And they should make us take a closer look at our politicians to see which are aligned with our better angels for a fairer, more just society, and for those who are not, stop playing footsie and firmly give them the boot.

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July 9, 2019

Puffins

An Atlantic puffin

I took these pictures of Atlantic puffins week before last at Machias Seal Island off the northern coast of Maine. Puffins nest there for a few weeks every year, and spend the rest of their lives at sea. It’s not easy to get to the island to see them: permits are required, and there are not a lot of permits. Even with a permit, the seas are often too rough to get there safely. One of our two planned trips to the island was cancelled on account of weather. But for our second trip, the skies cleared up and the seas calmed down, and we got to see the famous birds.

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With the puffins on Machias were a lot of nesting razorbills and murres. Both are gorgeous, though of course not as photogenic as the puffins — who is? It was a real thrill to spend time with all these amazing birds.

A common murre, also known as a common guillemot

Razorbills, which are the closest living relatives to the extinct great auk

The puffins are fast fliers and skilled fishermen. And they’re incredibly cute! We stood in small wooden blinds to photograph them. At times the birds were so close that I couldn’t get them in focus with my big zoom lens.

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Our group was organized by the Georgia Nature Photographers Association, which I joined to participate in this trip. I enjoyed meeting the Georgians, who were all very nice and very experienced in nature photography. With Bill and Ken, I explored some of the area parks, and started to fall in love with the Maine. There were lovely harbors, big forests, and many wildflowers. The weather was mostly cool and rainy.

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June 12, 2019

Resetting in retirement, new animal photos, new music, and reading The Uninhabitable Earth

A white-tailed deer at Lake Wheeler

My transition from a corporate schedule to a non-corporate one has been fairly undramatic. I find myself smiling more and carrying around less stress. But it’s been sudden, and a little disorienting. On Sunday night, I found myself starting to think about getting up early to get to the gym for the start of a new corporate work week, when there wasn’t going to be one. Old habits die hard.

But I’m starting to develop some new routines that I like. Instead of rushing out early to the gym, most days I’m starting with 20 minutes of mindfulness meditation. Then I head out to one of our local forests and lakes with my camera and look about for animals and plants in the gentle early light. After a couple of hours of looking, I head to the gym for various types of cardio activity, resistance training, core work, and stretching. If it’s not a swimming day, I either read or listen to podcasts while I sweat.

Back home, I get a shower and make a green smoothie for a late breakfast. Then I’ll download and process my latest photographs. I’m experimenting with various software tools, including especially Lightroom and Photoshop, and also Topaz, Nik, Aurora, and Helicon Focus.

When my eyes and neck start to ache from photo processing, I usually practice the piano. Currently on the workbench are Chopin’s first Impromptu and the Op. 27, No. 1 Nocturne, Liszt’s third Consolation, and Brahms’s Rhapsody Op. 79, No. 2.

I’ve also been working on a couple of dozen jazz standards, like Misty, Stardust, and All the Things You Are. I got reasonably proficient at playing some of the great American songbook before law school, but afterwards put that music it in storage for most of the last 30 years. Now I’m getting the dust and cobwebs off and enjoying it again.

A gray squirrel with a hot dog at Lake Wheeler

Speaking of music, I finished reading the new biography of the Robert Schumann by Judith Chernaik, which I found worthwhile. Schumann (1810-1849) was a great composer, who adored and married Clara Schumann, a great pianist, and had several children. He struggled with mental illness for much of his life, but left an enduring legacy.

I also finished reading Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Machines Like Me. It’s a sometimes funny but ultimately serious book set in the recent past but with a futuristic premise: the protagonist buys an expensive new home gadget, which is a completely realistic super intelligent humanoid robot. There are various practical problems with having this device, and even more moral problems. I find the trajectory of advancing artificial intelligence fairly worrisome, and McEwan gave me some new grounds for worry.

Although I finished The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells, I immediately began re-reading it. I would not recommend this book to anyone struggling with depression. The unvarnished accounting of the global-scale disasters that, to a high degree of probability, are coming our way are hard to process. But I’m hoping there are many healthy people who will read it and be inspired to action. As much as Wallace-Wells makes vivid and real the possibility of cascading climate disasters, he also explains that, just as this is a situation that humans have created, it is one that humans have it in their power to address.

A great blue heron at Crabtree swamp

This week there was a good Ted Radio Hour podcast on this same subject. It was inspiring to hear 16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg, and get some ideas about carbon capture, animal agricultural redirection, and addressing climate change denial. I’d like to think the dire reality of our situation is starting to sink in to public consciousness, and we may be starting to pull out of our death spiral.

In E.O.Wilson’s recent book Half Earth, on preventing more species extinctions (which I’m also re-reading), he points out another possible name for the coming era. Instead of the Anthropocene, which emphasizes a biological world existing “almost exclusively by, for, and of ourselves,” he suggests calling it “the Eremocene, the Age of Loneliness.” On our current trajectory, the earth will have fewer and fewer non-human species. This is, of course, disastrous for non-domesticated animals and plants, but also tragic for the humans who remain.

Carolina wren at Yates Mill Pond

It’s always seemed to me a simple thing to enjoy being outside in nature, but it’s starting to seem less common and more worthy of attention. Now that I have more time to get out to our local parks, I’m spending more time with our still common animal neighbors, like deer, squirrels, and birds. The ones here are from the past week. The deer at Lake Wheeler seemed shy but interested in having a good look at me. The squirrels there were having an after-picnic picnic. The great blue heron at Crabtree swamp spent a long time hunting, standing still for periods, moving slowly, and striking quickly. It had several little fish for breakfast.

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December 9, 2018

The Eno at the end of fall, meditating, a piano lesson, and a list of thought-provoking books

With a big winter storm on the way, on Saturday I drove over to Durham and hiked along the Eno River on the Cole Mill trail. The colors were muted, and I was reminded of that melancholy tune by the Mamas and the Papas: “All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray.” It was quiet, except for the noise of the fast-moving water.

I’d brought along my camera equipment, planning to make some landscape images, but struggled to get inspired. Things didn’t seem at all scenic, and in fact seemed kind of sad. But after a bit I slowed down and started noticing spots of unusual energy, like tree roots and branches, decaying stumps and pale lichens on boulders. The shots here are what developed.

Taking in smaller wonders is one of the lessons I’ve taken from my efforts at mindfulness meditation. Over the last few months, my 15 minutes of daily sitting have helped with managing stress, and also has given me some meaningful, though humbling, insights into my own unruly thinking processes. I’m looking forward to learning more.

On Saturday afternoon I had a piano lesson with Olga Kleiankina over at the N.C. State music department. As I’ve noted before, I usually think of my piano playing as music therapy, providing personal balance, flow, and happiness, without many connections to my professional or social life. But Olga always reminds me that piano playing is also a serious undertaking, with long traditions, deep musical questions, and technical challenges that are not easily surmounted, as well as the potential for personal expression, communicating feelings, and transcendent beauty.

This week I played a well-loved Chopin waltz (c# minor, Op. 64, no. 2). I arrived with a good mastery of the notes and a decent understanding of the architecture. She wanted me to incorporate some new gestural elements to improve the sound, and explained to me how she uses the legs and core for fine keyboard control. I also played Debussy’s beautiful Bruyeres from Preludes, book 2. We talked about varying tone colors and voicing (both horizontally and vertically), and specialized pedaling challenges. The lesson was almost two hours, and I was exhausted at the end, but also inspired.

Last week I was telling a friend about rereading (actually, re-listening to) Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. He noted that in the last couple of years I’d mentioned several books that relate to his interests in evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy, and asked if I’d mind making a list of favorites.

So I looked over what I’d read involving science topics and other big ideas in the last couple of years, and realized, it’s a lot! For whatever it’s worth, here is a selection of books I found worthwhile and would be happy to discuss with other readers. I have not attempted to rank them, but they are roughly grouped by major subject.

Science matters, mainly in the areas of physics, biology (including neuroscience), and psychology

The Greatest Story Ever Told — So Far: Why Are We Here? By Lawrence Krauss

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, by David Christian

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, by Sean Carroll

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, by Ed Yong

The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, by Robert Wright

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, by Robert M. Sapolsky

Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do, by John Bargh

The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins, by Jonathan Balcombe

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, by Peter Wohlleben

Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, by Edward O. Wilson

Assorted Other Interesting Ideas

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, by Jeremy Lent

The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World, by Scott Montgomery and Daniel Chirot

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by Timothy Snyder

The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel Ellsberg

Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, by Robert Wright

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