There’s so much and I don’t think there is one area. Gaps are everywhere. The more you learn, the more you know you don’t know. The Middle East, for example, is not well studied. There are other gaps topically. Even in areas where lots of people have worked on, the work just brings more things for people to study.
I believe that we are all born artists. I know that you are a better artist when you are a scientist and that you are a better scientist when you are an artist. You can combine imagination with information.
Headwater. Mouth of the river. So hard to understand where it starts and where it ends, to remember the headwater tiny, a trickle, a bubble up out of dry ground, and the mouth—wide as a country. With greater ease I learned the dark swimming moons beside my rowboat in Crystal River were sea cows. Manatees. …
One of the things art and humanities do at a big university is to make us all alertly observant. Art does have the power to make us newly aware of things that we thought we already knew.
Brant has travelled all around the Great Lakes basin, interviewing fishermen and scientists. He clearly honors these people and the work they have done. Their pictures and their stories are scattered throughout the book.
As [women water carriers] passed, almost like a ritual, the village men, especially younger ones, working in the nearby fields and farms would take a break from their work and line up on the sides of the road to watch them go by.
It was not just the weight of the burdens they were carrying, but the heavier burden of a world in chaos.
I remember the first thing Vienna said to me, after she ran up the driveway to our cabin, was “The water is full of poison.” When I said “What?” she stepped back, and scraped her eyes over me, instead of answering, a clear appraisal. “You got a little taller,” she said. She was much taller, …
“…I am also a little tired of offering reassurance. Because I don’t want to reassure people so that they go home feeling vaguely optimistic. What I want is for more people to recognize the urgency of the present moment and become involved in climate activism in their local communities.”
