Reflections on the End of Another (California) Fire Season

More and more often, when my mother calls me from Santa Rosa - after the Democratic debates, after the impeachment hearings, after another horrific fire season in California - she asks why people aren't panicking more about climate change. "Well, the fossil fuel lobby has put a ton of money into convincing people it isn't real." 

"Not those people. The people who do understand that its happening. Why aren't they panicking? Why aren't they doing something?" I tell her honestly: I don't know.

"Maybe if they lived here," she says, "they would get it."

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To live in California is to be fire-touched. If you haven't lost your home, your town, your pets, your family, you probably know someone who has. To live in California is to hike in forests where the trees have blackened trunks, where drought meant water rationing for years, where hot wind rising is enough to make your pulse pound.

To live in California is to know fire is personal. For me it is increasingly personal: over 8400 buildings and structures burned down in Santa Rosa and the surrounding region in 2017, and my parents evacuated; many of my friends lost their homes. The following year, in Agoura Hills, my grandmother's house - the house my dad grew up in - burned to the ground.

Grandma June's House, post Woolsey Fire

To live in California is also to know that fire season is getting worse. "Fourteen of the 20 most destructive fires in state history have occurred since 2007, and California has 78 more annual "fire days" now than it had 50 years ago." 2018 was the worse fire year for the state on record. The state's normal fire budget is running out only months into the year and emergency funds are being allotted so regularly one wonders if they shouldn't just become part of the regular budget.

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I am not in California right now. I moved to New York / Cambridge (long story) three and a half years ago. People ask me about the culture shock. Yes, there is no good Mexican food in Cambridge ("Felipé's" exists, which is probably the best you can say for it). Yes, I miss wearing flip-flops everywhere. Yes, people are very stressed out here.

But. There's something else that long-term residents don't really pick up on.

In a way, New York and Cambridge are the center of the world. What matters here matters nationally. When Camille and I moved here, we were struck by how the world becomes a cocoon. So many TV shows are set in New York, and if possible, even more novels. For people outside of New York, the media is about New York, and for New Yorkers, the media is even more about New York.

The inverse is also true, to a degree; what doesn't matter here doesn't matter nationally.  Policy is set here - agendas are set here. Empathy deficits - information deficits - in New York and Cambridge matter. If something doesn't effect New York, is it even real?
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It's a bit ridiculous to talk about California as some forgotten flyover country. It's the most populated state in the US; it's where Hollywood and Silicon Valley are; it has its own monstrously outsized influence. But if I had to identify a place where culture is made - as if such a thing were possible - it would be the Northeast: Washington DC, New York, and Cambridge.

This influence isn't hegemonic. It's not all-encompassing. But it matters.

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In the Northeast, to be fire-touched has nothing to do with climate change. I have technically been closer to a fire living here than I ever was in California - an apartment on the floor directly below us has burned down twice in the past year. Nobody knows why, the building management company says nothing, long-term residents tell stories about the fires of '87, of '01, how the whole of the 35th floor burned down and people had to jump into the street. I don't know the exact dates. Records that might exist, buried deep in the cities' archives. The real records are in the bodies of the long-term residents: the way they don't trust the elevators, the suspicion of new notices from the building management company, the rates of asthma and cancer and who knows what else, all throughout Harlem and the Bronx. Fire in New York is a class issue (and because this is America, also a race issue), not a climate issue, and its the type of class issue that the unaffected feel bad about but comfortable ignoring, because what are they to do about it?

The people in my building are fire-touched, but they don't write about it in the national papers.

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Today I received a call for papers from a conference here in the Northeast to discuss cultural responses to climate change. It highlighted examples of how the climate crisis emerges in moments of disruption and disaster - among them, "the fires raging in the Pacific North West, throughout California..."

According to Amitav Ghosh, "the canon," so-called "serious fiction," has failed to deal with climate change. I think to a certain extent this framing confounds cause and effect; by dealing with climate change, fiction is removed from the "canon" and relegated to other, apparently less prestigious, genres. Climate change, apparently, is not about "the human and the human condition." 

The first solution is obvious: abolish the canon. I am already on the record that the concept of the canon is not merely pretentious but insidious, a last-stand of a bourgeois academy to exercise the power of exclusion. The most damning traits of so much "canonical" late 20th century fiction - its rank misogyny, its racism, its middle-class self-centeredness, its anthropocentrism - are all symptoms of an almost-comic narrowness of vision. Who can say with a straight face that novels of white academic men in bad marriages, the bread and butter of the Phillip Roths and John Updikes and Harold Blooms and -yes despite his editorializing- Jonathan Franzens, are in any way representative of the human condition?  I want to slap the canon in the face: The world is on fire. People are on fire. That is the human condition in 2019. 

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Just not for certain people in New York and Cambridge. These people are, unfortunately, the ones who make policy, who run think tanks or congress or the universities and magazines and news channels that influence them. While obviously Western universities matter, I think few would argue that they do not exert the cultural gravitation of New York, a city that pulls 

The canon is a symptom of a deeper problem. Urgent action on climate change won't happen if the people in the corridors of power don't feel it is urgent to them. For them (the ones who believe anthropogenic climate change is real; the ones who don't are a different issue entirely), climate change is still something that will happen; it exists in the future tense. Climate change fiction is science fiction in New York and Cambridge because it seems not to be reality there yet. Climate fiction isn't the human condition because it hasn't affected them as human beings, beyond some vague anxiety caused by vague headlines about some other part of the world that was never quite real in the first place. 

It hasn't burned down their house yet. 

*****

This isn't true for the East Coast broadly, where climate change is very much a reality.  Monarch butterfly migrations have shifted north; once the cod capital of the world, the Gulf of Main is now too warm for the species to flourish; sugar maples are experiencing stunted growth, threatening the future of maple sugar. But these are problems for the working class and ecologists and non-human lifeforms. They do not touch the centers of urban metropolises. 

*****

The theme of the American Society for Literature and the Environment conference in Davis this past year was "Paradise on Fire," and the panel that stuck with me the most was a special session not on literature but on the Camp Fire itself. The panel consisted of a fire ecologist, a forest recovery strategist, and a former resident of Paradise. 

There's a Netflix documentary out about the Camp Fire now with that same title: "Paradise on Fire." It's forty minutes of a town of twenty thousand people burning to the ground. 

This panel and this documentary will never be part of "the canon." But they do compose something else, something I am calling the archive of climate disruption. This is an archive the 21st century is compiling, accretion by accretion, disaster by disaster: Hurricane Katrina. The BP oil spill. The ongoing Sahel Droughts. The bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. The loss of arctic sea ice, the destabilizing of permafrost, the collapse and restructuring of fisheries across the North Atlantic. The archive is vast. It is contestable (it is very difficult to trace any given weather event to climate change since climate is by definition the accumulation of many weather events). The archive is also difficult to grasp psychologically, for several reasons. 

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During my PhD General Exams, one of my advisors asked me: "What is Environmental History?" 

My first answer - "everything" -  didn't satisfy him, so I elaborated: "It's a matter of focus. Every aspect of history involves material relations between the human and the nonhuman, but environmental history puts those relations front and center." (Full disclosure: I didn't say it even close to that coherently). 

What environmental history is about is connectivity. This is a word I first learned in during my Earth Systems MS: in this context, it refers to the complexity of links and connections within and between environmental systems. The carbon cycle, for instance, involves many smaller cycles, both human-driven and natural, operating on vastly different timescales. Its complexity and connectivity mean that small changes in one part of the cycle can greatly influence other parts, even if they are very distant in space and time.

 

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Which brings us back to our archive of climate disruption. Items in the archive vary in size, in impact, and in the length of their chains of causation. It's much easier to grasp that 1) BP was at fault for not implementing safety measures that led to Deepwater Horizon exploding and leaking 130 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, 

for instance, than it is to grasp that 

2) BP was *also* at fault for extracting and profiting off far greater quantities of oil, which was then refined into gasoline and burned in the automobiles and other combustion engines that the vast majority of Americans use in one form or another, which raised atmospheric CO2 concentrations, which trapped more heat, which raised global temperatures, which has a wide variety of disparate impacts around the world, including drying and warming the Pacific Coast, leading to a longer and hotter fire season for California. 

BP is responsible for both of these items in the archive, but one has a much longer chain of causation than the other. One is legally criminal; the other entirely legal. Ordinary Americans are arguably complicit in both, since there would be no oil spill if there were no demand for oil, but it feels obvious that we are not the primary villains. For climate change more broadly, that is far less obvious. We avoid thinking about it because we are complicit, because we do not know how to end our complicity, because the chain of causation is long enough to let us off the hook. Because we are not on fire yet. 

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Besides setting New York on fire, I don't know what the solution is. On the one hand, it seems cruel to make people in the ACELA corridor more anxious than they already are (these are not un-anxious people). On the other hand, the empathy deficit is itself becoming an existential problem. Mitigating climate change will mean really big, impactful decisions about energy resources, energy use and efficiency, and standard of living, and it will mean making them quickly - much faster than things usually happen in American politics. People's lives are going to be affected. The political will for this response - the only response that can make a difference - is dependent on people realizing that this is an emergency. 

White upper middle-class people are historically not very good at emergency identification if they are not affected by them. 

 If they don't think my building in Harlem being on fire every couple months is an emergency, I don't know why I expect them to think the same for a state on the other side of the country. Or flooded farms in Iowa, or deliberate fires set in the Amazon, or disappearing sandbars in the Marshall Islands, or 150 million displaced people in Bangladesh. 

That last one hasn't happened yet. That many refugees is going to be a lot harder to ignore, but white upper middle class people are historically, and currently, very good at ignoring refugees. 

*****

We should be marching in the streets. Every day. 

This is the solution that Extinction Rebellion has come up with, because nothing else is working. I agree with them. Nothing else is working. 

I also heard someone say the other day that the one thing everyone in the Beltway agrees on is that climate protests are silly, not to be taken seriously. So what are we to do? 

In Dipesh Chakrabarty's highly influential essay, The Climate of History: Four Theses, he argues there will be no life rafts for the rich and powerful. It's a compelling line rhetorically, but I don't think anyone told the rich and powerful that they don't get life rafts. They're certainly not acting like they need them. Then again, everyone is invincible right until they aren't. 

*****

At least not the ones on the East Coast. Another thing Environmental History teaches is that geography matters. Jane Fonda and Sally Field have been protesting climate change and getting arrested for it for much of the past year. They live in Beverly Hills and Malibu, respectively - two places that are frequently on fire. While they are obviously also conscientious individuals with a long history of protesting progressive causes, I don't think it is an accident that they picked climate change. 

Of my two alma maters, Stanford (despite its many flaws; taking fossil fuel money for its Earth Sciences programs not least among them) has divested from coal; Harvard hasn't. That is not an accident either. 

*******

So for now, California is attempting to lead the country on climate change. 

There are some changes that it can make on its own: socializing PG&E and putting their notoriously failure-prone power lines underground would be a great start. So would funding alternative energy and efficient transportation- there is no reason not to expand solar power across the desert and real train routes across the Bay Area and SoCal. 

There are some changes California can make on its own if it is allowed to by the Supreme Court, like raising fuel emissions standards, as it's done before. This has the effect of forcing auto companies to make more efficient cars across the country, rather than two different vehicles of each model for different states. 

But it can't stop coal and oil production in other states. It can't install charging stations for electric vehicles or solar panels or wind farms outside its borders; it can't build interstate public transit. It can't rescue climate refugees or honor treaties with indigenous Nations to preserve the natural processes essential to their worlds and sovereignties. It can't prevent and can barely slow down the increase in emissions that makes fire season longer and hotter.  

One state cannot save the nation. Only the nation can do that. 

We can vote. We can vote strategically, we can vote passionately, but if we don't vote for people who have plans to take climate change seriously, we might as well be voting for climate deniers. 

*******

It's raining now, in theory - little drizzles that are enough to quench the driest of the brush. Fire season is (probably) over, though on the other side of the planet in Australia it's still blazing.  California will get a few months of reprieve. 

Until then? 

We can get our shit together and pay attention, because just as assuredly as there will be an election in the fall of 2020, there will be another fire season. 

It's September 2019 and there are at least six living vaquitas on Earth. That matters.

Scientists have found six living vaquitas. This is a big big deal, and I have conflicting feelings.  

On the one hand, the animal is almost extinct (estimated less than twenty left), there is no captive population and it's too late to build one (attempts to capture a vaquita a few years ago resulted in it dying, which isn't worth the risk with such a small population). It is very likely to go extinct even if every formal protection were actually enacted, which isn't the case (totoaba is still illegally fished and vaquita get caught in the totoaba nets). Even if there really are 30 animals or slightly more, that's well below the threshold for genetic sustainability, and even if numbers somehow recovered in the short term, the species would be in big trouble in the long-term. We're spending a lot of time and money that should have been spent 20 years ago, and maybe should go to species we have a better chance of saving now.

On the other hand, I'm really excited about this.

 I'm glad that scientists and nations are putting the effort in, and I'm struggling to justify why. Firstly, (although the article mentions six were also seen last year) we've gone a while without an announcement that anyone has actually seen a vaquita, and while population estimates have been declining from 60-30 (I had also heard 20) over the past few years, I haven't been sure what they've been based on. So just knowing at least six are still out there is exciting, for some reason. It's an affective attachment, as environmental humanities scholars say. I've never seen a vaquita, I probably never will, but I care, I don't know why, I just care. It feels like hope, even if it's temporary, even though I'm not sure what hope in an age of extinction really means.

It also feels like it matters that they're in a pod together and frolicking in pairs - cetaceans are highly social and extinction like many ways of dying seems inherently anti-social. I'm reminded of David Quammen's metaphor of a Persian carpet cut into tiny pieces - habitats are split up, populations are isolated, communities become islands of isolated individuals. On one level this is true. Every species that goes extinct, which is over 99% of all species that ever lived, technically has a last surviving individual. In the words of Capt. Mal Reynolds from Firefly, everyone dies alone.

But maybe we don't have to live alone as we're dying. We can be together, and we can bear witness.

This is what Donna Haraway means by "staying with the trouble" - not turning our gaze but finding ethical ways of living and dying together. They won't be perfect. They might not be enough. Maybe we're doing it for ourselves and not the animals. But that's ok. We need to try.
The results matter, but the trying matters too.

We just have to not look away.

World Pangolin Day: Staying with the Trouble

CW: images of animal cruelty, racism

PC: The Nature Conservancy 

Today is the fifth annual World Pangolin Day, and I am struggling to stay optimistic about the future of this unique and incredible animal. There are eight species of pangolin living in Asia and Africa, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List considers all of them vulnerable (the four African species) endangered (Indian and Philippine pangolins) or critically endangered (the Chinese and Sunda pangolin). They are virtually resistant to predation in the wild, rolling up into an impenetrable ball of scales than even lion teeth can't break. Unfortunately, thanks to our opposable thumbs, rolling into a ball is not a very useful defense against humans.

PC: Mark Sheridan-Johnson

Pangolins are the most illegally traded animal in the world. They are hunted for bushmeat meat in Africa, shipped live as an expensive delicacy in Southeast Asia, and their scales (as well as whole baby pangolins) are used for a variety of medicinal purposes, from treating skin conditions to helping nursing women. Discoveries of illegal shipments of scales from tens of thousands of pangolins are frequent, with two occurring in the past two weeks.  Despite a complete international ban on all pangolin products, they are also still available in Chicago and New York. 

I have been sharing information about pangolins for a few years now, and the two most frequent reactions I get are "So cute!" and "So sad!"

There are different ways to deal with the emotions around the latter.  Some are healthier than others.

Aggression 
One is blaming the Other. This type of blatant racism is infuriatingly common (and to anyone with a passing familiarity with this thing called the internet, completely unsurprising) on posts (Facebook, Instagram, news articles) related to wildlife trafficking and animal consumption, but also in a less blatant form in journalism and academic literature. With fish and whales it appears to be targeted most strongly at Japan (even though Iceland, Norway, and Denmark are also major whaling nations, and the vast majority of whales were historically killed by *checks notes* the US, UK, and USSR). With terrestrial mammals mainland Asia (especially China) and Africa receive most of the vitriol. The alleged rapaciousness of Asia is one manifestation, which ignores that Europe and the US have long since hunted much of our native wildlife (e.g. the American bison, passenger pigeon, wolves, grizzly bears (whose native range stretched down to Missouri)) into extinction or reduced to small game reserves.

WTF is wrong with people

What is most insidious about this environmentally-focused racism is that it directly recapitulates the white supremacy and patronizing condescension of imperialism on a post-colonial context that only exists because of imperialism and global capitalism in the first place. Smuggling and poaching networks take advantage of global shipping routes; guns, nets, and traps are often made and sold in the West or by Western companies; and demand itself is often a product of the contingent circumstances of war and empire (I will write a blog post in the future about the rise of whale meat and bluefin tuna in Japan as consumer products - the US occupation post-WWII was a pivotal moment for their adoption and integration into self-reproducing cultural pathways like school lunches. Japan's fishing and whaling fleet was rebuilt using US dollars and State Department guidance).

With pangolins, I am still learning about their cultural roles in their native environments. It isn't particularly helpful that Western media loves to recapitulate the clickbait-y trope that "This obscure animal will go extinct before you even know it exists!" which assumes nobody knows anything about pangolins. In fact, they feature prominently in Southeast Asian mythology, where they travel throughout the world in a vast underground tunnel network, earning them the Cantonese name Chun-shua-cap, or the creature that bores through the mountain.

I think one aspect of this environmental racism is the assumption that because something is happening in a given location, everyone from that location is complicit. This couldn't be more wrong. In particular, it erases the hard work and incredible bravery of educators, park rangers and wildlife rescue workers in places where being an environmentalist can put you on the wrong side of a $20 billion per year organized crime industry. Over five hundred (and potentially up to a thousand) park rangers have been killed in the past ten years alone, many by poachers. They need support, not dismissal.

Nihilism

Another reaction to the wildlife crisis is embracing the void. Earlier this week, a colleague and close friend working on biodiversity issues was asked by a senior scholar in our field why it all matters - wildlife is doomed, the species we care about will go extinct, we humans are headed for a climate-change induced demographic collapse. I've been pondering this nihilistic reaction in my head all week. I think at the end of the day it's a protective mechanism; we shut down and become cynical to avoid having to emotionally process the horror of the world and our complicity in it. One of my favorite scholars, ecofeminist and multi-species ethnographer Donna Haraway, asks in her latest book, Staying With The Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, how we can avoid succumbing to the twin fallacies of techno-optimism (everything will be ok because we have the power to control the universe and fix it) and despair. Her solution is simple but not easy; we have to make connections across boundaries like nation, class, race - and species.

So: how do we make connections? 

One way is through education. The more we know, the more we can share with our networks and communities. I am sharing a few articles about the wildlife trade here that get behind the scenes into the business of trafficking and consumption. They are not all perfect in their perspectives, and my sense from traveling briefly in Southeast Asia and talking to people here is that the widespread indifference to wildlife trafficking some of these articles cite is changing rapidly. That said, I think they have something valuable to offer.

In Vietnam, Rampant Wildlife Smuggling Prompts Little Concern

The Most Trafficked Mammal You've Never Heard Of 

Sir David Attenborough Picks Ten Animals He Would Take on His Ark 

Another way to connect is by supporting organizations that do direct conservation. There are two main ways to do this: top-down hierarchical methods, and grassroots or bottom-up approaches. While both have advantages and disadvantages, I don't think comparison is useful; they're both necessary and fill different niches.

The IUCN's Pangolin Specialist Group is one example of the hierarchical model; it funds work on pangolin conservation biology, which can help create government conservation plans. These are often essential but can be frustratingly slow. Pangolin Conservation is one of the few Western-based environmental organizations dedicated solely to (surprise!) pangolin conservation. They raise money for consortiums of researchers, advocate for laws to crack down on pangolin products sold in the US, and do valuable networking between zoos and other conservation organizations that otherwise might not be in contact with each other. They are also experimenting with captive breeding programs; pangolins are extremely difficult to keep alive in captivity, but some success has been had at local rescue parks in Namibia, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Ex situ conservation is never ideal, but when in situ conservation is struggling, it is an option that requires consideration. 

Pangolin Conservation is not by any means big. Local wildlife rescue organizations are often even smaller and even less well funded. They include the locally-run Save Vietnam's Wildlife, which is one of the few organizations that rehabilitates injured pangolins and is frequently at capacity when new pangolins arrive that need help. Their director, Nguyen Van Thai, has had to rush to rescue smuggled animals before corrupt officials sell them back to the black market. There are also programs like REST (Rare and Endangered Species Trust) Namibia and World Land Trust which are not solely dedicated to pangolins but fund park rangers who defend broader habitats against poachers.

If you are interested in doing something to help, I would recommend donating to either Pangolin Conservation or Save Vietnam's Wildlife. I am looking for ways to volunteer - Pangolin Conservation suggests there will be more opportunities in the future. In the meantime, I hope we can stay with the trouble - embrace and lean into our connections, and while not drowning in grief, allow ourselves to feel what we are losing. 

But why though?

This space won't usually be so serious or so personal. I don't think. But I wanted to get this out now.

One of the most influential books ever published in England, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, begins with "A Declaration Concerning The Utilitie And Profite Of Thys History." There were so many books in the world in 1563 that bringing another one into existence required the author to provide some justification. Foxe would presumably be horrified at the present overcrowded and under-read state of the blogosphere. (He would also be horrified at the continued existence of Catholics; I am certainly not advocating Foxe as a model for anything). But I do want to talk a bit about what compelled this blog into existence.

Most Americans who make New Years resolutions typically make them between December 26-January 2 [citation needed]. There's an obvious logic here: it's the end of the Gregorian calendar year, which is a logical beginning. There are other dates that make sense too: Rosh Hashanah, the Lunar New Year, etc.

I have wanted to start a blog for a while. I want to talk about current events in the environmental and history/STS discourse, respond to things I've read, and keep an update on my life.

So why am I doing this now?

Although there is not, to my knowledge, a traditional calendar that starts January 20th,  it feels like a new year to me. The past two years have felt like twenty years, and a few other dates have unexpectedly asserted their precedence in my mental calendar.

August 3, 2017: the date I am diagnosed with testicular cancer. My first surgery happens the following day. At some point during this 24-hour period Camille and I find time to call our parents.

August 9, 2017: the date imaging reveals the cancer to be Stage IIB, meaning it has become metastatic and spread through the lymphatic system but not - as far as we knew - to other organs. (In a quirk characteristic of the contingent history of medical diagnosis, whether a patient has Stage IIA and IIB can be dependent on whether the patient is examined by a pathologist or radiologist. The stages are distinguished by the size of the largest lymph node - IIA is under 2cm, IIB is larger. For a radiologist, only the horizontal cross-section of the lymph-node is measured, because CT scans used to only provide horizontal cross-sections with requisite precision; although vertical imaging exists, the data collected to determine staging still applies only to horizontal cross sections. For a pathologist, looking at a lymph node on a dissection table, any direction will do just fine. So I could have been IIA or IIB, depending on whether the lymph node in question was still inside me or not.)

We move apartments. I begin chemotherapy the next week, and am immediately hospitalized with a neutropenic fever.
Everything from here through approximately the following April is still a blur of chemo-brain. Nausea, needle-sticks, bloating, memory loss, fatigue. Sometimes I have the strength to half-read a graphic novel or watch The Good Place. Some memories of this time still exist, in some cases, but most have been blocked so that I can return to what I sometimes call "real life." Which of course raises the question: if this is real life, what the hell was that?

November 24, 2017: the day after Thanksgiving, and the last time I have to come into Memorial Sloan Kettering for chemotherapy. I would still be hospitalized twice more.

Camille and I are given the all-clear to travel to her parents' house in Maui for the winter, where I spend two weeks with horses and sunshine. I think I see light at the end of the tunnel.

January 12, 2018: My second surgery, a retroperitoneal lymph node dissection. I am visited (in person and remotely) by the best support system of family and friends I could possibly ask for.

January 19th, 2018: My first day home from the hospital. It is rare for oncologists to say a patient is cancer-free, but I am told I have no evidence of disease. I am incredibly lucky to have had a cancer that is curable, or nearly so - there is a 96% five-year survival rate for the stage that I had. I still come in for regular checkups with blood-work and x-rays, and still live with residual uncertainty and occasional flashbacks to what I realized I think of as the Underworld.

Anniversaries of these dates, in the single year since they happened, are typically less like new years celebrations and more like Frodo's cyclical illnesses years after after getting stabbed by the Ringwraith. They bring me temporarily back into a world I have mostly left behind. It is an uncanny feeling but perhaps a useful one. There is a calendar of Big Life Events lurking beneath the quotidian calendar of our normal lives, and getting periodically reminded of that is a good way of not stressing so much about upcoming conference deadlines or general exam reading.

So: why a blog? 

For one, I want to have a place where I can record my thoughts before they leave me. During my sickness, time began to feel increasingly non-linear. Certain days lasted forever, other weeks and months vanished down the memory-hole forever. I found paragraphs in my novel's Google Doc that I swear I never wrote. I keep a journal, but it it is sometimes difficult to find the energy to record things for myself. In some ways it's similar to cooking - making a meal for friends and loved ones gives me energy and inspiration. Left alone, I am liable to eat boxed macaroni and cheese every night for a week. (Annie's, if you are in the market to sponsor blogs with zero current readership, I'm here for you.)

Cancer also drove home the difference between statistical likelihood and individual contingency. I had a minute chance of developing cancer in the first place, but it happened. I had a 5-15% chance of developing a neutropenic fever, but that happened. We plan our lives as if we know what will happen next, based on statistical likelihoods. I probably won't get hit by a bus tomorrow, but I might. I probably won't get cancer again, but I might. Waiting to do anything increases the likelihood it will never happen. So I have decided to stop waiting. As Dan Poynter said, "if you wait to write, you're not a writer, you're a waiter." He also wrote over 130 books, which is honestly too many, so ... also not exactly goals.

I am also learning more about academia, which I love possibly more than most academics, but also has very real institutional flaws (this may be a theme of future posts). One of them is that the publishing schedule is slow and complicated, and even a published article will not reach that many people due to access barriers like paywalls. Also, many (most, tbh) of my thoughts don't deserve a published article, but in my infinite vanity I want them to go somewhere, and they are often too obscure for a Facebook post and too long for a tweet.

Hence, this hellish medium, the blog.

Welcome, friends. I am so sorry.

<3