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The Times Correction of Jim Harrison’s “My Upper Peninsula” Falls Short In Three Ways

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The Travel section of the November 29th edition of the New York Times featured an article by Jim Harrison about traveling Michigan’s Upper Peninsula called “My Upper Peninsula.” It turns out Harrison’s Upper Peninsula is a place more fondly remembered than accurately observed, and the Times has had to make a number of corrections to his piece.

Probably the most egregious error in the original piece comes just a few paragraphs in, where Harrison explains to prospective travelers to the UP that “you can drink the water directly from Lake Superior,” as he himself used to do on his “long beach walks.” The water of Lake Superior is clean, he wrote in that first version, because “there is little or no industry, and all of the mines are closed.”

I was probably not the only person to send a letter to the editors reminding them that some UP mines are still open and that the Times itself had published a report, in May of 2012, on the new mining boom in the Upper Peninsula. My letter went on to say that the new sulfide mining (the mining of nickel and copper) along with new gold and uranium mining projects in the UP — and all around Lake Superior — pose a very serious risk to the big freshwater lake.

Just one project, the Polymet mine near Hoyt Lakes, Minnesota, will require water pollution treatment for a minimum of 500 years.

Last week, the Times published this correction:

Correction: December 4, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the state of mining in the Upper Peninsula; there are indeed some mines operating in the area — it is not true that all the mines are closed.

The passage about long beach walks now reads:

While camping I would study maps to try to figure out where I was other than within a cloud of mosquitoes and black flies, that irritating species that depends on clean water, of which there is a great deal in the U.P. There is little or no industry; therefore you could drink the water directly from Lake Superior — at least I always did on my long beach walks.

This new version tries to skirt the issue by consigning it to the past. Where Harrison originally wrote “you can drink,” now we are told “you could drink” the water. There is still “a great deal” of clean water in the UP, but this version takes refuge in “at least I always did,” to qualify the drinking. It could all have been a mistake.

But this correction doesn’t do the trick, for at least three reasons.

First, it doesn’t even come close to capturing what’s really going on these days. We still have no no reference to the Times original report on the boom. “It is not true that all the mines are closed” is a far cry from “many new mines are opening, and there is a mining and leasing boom” – which is a lot closer to the what the Times reported in 2012 and a lot closer to the facts: just look at the map of Lake Superior Mines, Mineral Exploration and Mineral Leasing published by the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. The problem here is only compounded by a couple of sentences near the end of the Harrison piece, which the editors let stand: “It’s not easy to cheerlead for the Upper Peninsula now after the extractive logging and mining. That bleakness is now mostly overgrown by forests except for a few slag piles.” Overgrown? Simply put, the bleakness that Harrison buries in the past is coming back to the UP.

Second – and this is a curious oversight for the Travel section – the new mining is going to endanger, or at least dramatically change, UP tourism, which is in large part about unimpeded access to wilderness areas and especially the freshwater wilderness of Lake Superior. Though tourism has been a growing sector of the UP economy, on its own it’s hardly enough to sustain the region (or any region for that matter). Mining proponents are usually quick to point this out. Most are very careful to say that they “don’t go around tearing down the tourism industry,” as one UP labor leader put it to me. Some are openly scornful of the contribution tourism makes to the regional economy. All acknowledge, as Harrison himself acknowledges, a tension between extractive industry and tourism; and doesn’t that tension belong at the center of any article about traveling to the UP?

Third, the corrected paragraph now makes very little sense. The editors have chosen to omit Harrison’s earlier statements about the disappearance of mining and recognize, in their correction, “some mines operating” in the Upper Peninsula. The paragraph about long beach walks simply states that “there is little or no industry” in the UP. I am not sure what this is supposed to mean: I guess “some” is supposed to be the equivalent of “little” or “none,” or mining doesn’t count as an industry. Be that as it may, the larger omission here has to do with the industrialization the new mining has already brought – the drilling, clear cutting, haul roads, and mine construction already underway are just the start — and how that will add to mounting industrial pressures on the lake: for example, the plan put forward by Enbridge to build a network of oil pipelines carrying diluted bitumen across the Great Lakes region, and to transport crude oil by barge across Lake Superior.

I realize, of course, that none of these observations are likely to find a place in the Travel section. Readers go there to encounter a world where nature is picturesque, and history and culture are placed on quaint and colorful exhibition. Advertisers count on it. The Travel section presents an exotic world, in the most literal sense, a world outside ordinary lived experience, fully exteriorized, a fantasy of escape. I suppose readers should look elsewhere in the paper of record to correct that impression, and to see the world as it really is.

Inside Greenberg’s Tuna Machine

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Paul Greenberg wants us to regard bluefin tuna as “wildlife” on the verge of extinction, but when he admires the fish he admires them as machines: at one point in his article for the New York Times Magazine he likens the bluefin to a big inefficient “Hummer”; he watches its “tuna motor” run, and slow; he marvels at the bluefin’s “miraculous engine.” And in one of the oddest passages in the entire article, he refers to the fish explicitly as a machine:

Not only is the bluefin’s dense, distinctly beefy musculature supremely appropriate for traversing the ocean’s breadth, but the animal also has attributes that make its evolutionary appearance seem almost deus ex machina, or rather machina ex deo — a machine from God. How else could a fish develop a sextantlike “pineal window” in the top of its head that scientists say enables it to navigate over thousands of miles? How else could a fish develop a propulsion system whereby a whip-thin crescent tail vibrates at fantastic speeds, shooting the bluefin forward at speeds that can reach 40 miles an hour? And how else would a fish appear within a mostly coldblooded phylum that can use its metabolic heat to raise its body temperature far above that of the surrounding water, allowing it to traverse the frigid seas of the subarctic?

This may be as pretentious as it is confusing. And the two qualities may be inseparable here. Take the most pretentious moment of all, the recourse to Latin and the variation on the literary phrase “deus ex machina.” Greenberg here first requires us to see the bluefin as a stage god of papier mache, brought up through the trap door or riser (the “machina”) on to the evolutionary stage. The fish is a piece of stagecraft, a device, the artifice of a Poet or Maker, I suppose, who writes the great drama of evolution. Here and elsewhere, Greenberg flirts with, but never really strikes, a compromise position between evolution and – I won’t call it Creationism, but I will call it Deism.

Horace, who coined the phrase “deus ex machina” in his Ars Poetica, considered the mechanical delivery of the god on stage a clumsy way to resolve plot conflicts, and advised strongly against it; but I suppose we are not meant to take the Latin that far, or that seriously. We, too, are supposed to pretend, or at least feel smug and assured. So it wouldn’t do, I suppose, to ask what conflict or entanglement is resolved by the evolutionary appearance of the bluefin.

Besides, Greenberg himself isn’t comfortable with the phrase, as his next move reveals: the bluefin tuna doesn’t just seem like a plot device, or a god brought on stage by the Maker of evolution; the fish also seems “a machine from God.” Whether “machina ex deo” is really the most elegant way to express this in Latin I leave for others to discuss, but I will note that the “ex” with the ablative “deo” here feels like a clunky way to express the idea of the bluefin as God’s machine, almost medieval, or like late Latin at best: it just feels a little too mechanical. (Of course that has not deterred scholars from using the phrase in books about technology; we even have Joan Rothschild’s Machina Ex Dea, an anthology that purports to offer “feminist perspectives on technology.”) Apparently, Greenberg and his editors at the Times did not fuss too much over the Latin, and could not resist the allure of the reversal here. But what does it mean? What could it mean?

The Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus conceived of a “creatio ex deo”. Creation, in this view, is an emanation from God, or “the One.” The emanation is simply (not merely, but simply) a consequence of the transcendent One. Plotinus asks us to consider the sun, which is not diminished by its rays. The created universe shines forth from Divine Nous, which Christian writers would identify with the Logos or the Word of John’s gospel. God in this conception is not the Aristotelian prime mover, creating the universe and all living things “ex nihilo,” out of nothing; presence itself, The One, is in no way affected or diminished or changed by the emanation of or from its presence. We recognize the transcendent One when we recognize the Good or the Beautiful in the world, and from there, as in Platonic thought, move to contemplate the Forms.

Now you can easily see how this Neoplatonic view – a view of the creation as an emanation of God, the beauty of which leads us to the Creator – could inform what I am calling Greenberg’s Deism. We can come to know God, the Transcendent One, by watching the bluefin run. But this isn’t exactly Greenberg’s point of view – or at least it’s not the point of view his language allows. Instead, he wants to see God as a great engineer, a maker of machines; he has converted creatures to machines.

This idea of the world as a big clockworks, and all the creatures as instruments in that elaborate work, has been around since the 17th century. For Descartes, animals are automata and their bodies are machines, a complex set of moving parts, which can be replaced by pistons, drivers, rods, chips, apps, and so on. This cold and cruel view is part of the great philosophical heritage of the fish farm that Greenberg visits in Hawaii, where the idea is to engineer a better sushi fish, so that the bluefin can be left to run wild – or so that we can still eat sushi after the bluefin go extinct. Man assumes the role of maker, or helpmate, to God; the exercise of dominion over the created world, entrusted to man by the God of Genesis, is really a bit like running a machine shop or an industrial plant.

What gets lost or severely diminished when we liken creatures to machines is the essence of Creation or, indeed, of evolution: what gets lost is life. Wendell Berry has written beautifully on this theme, the ugly determinism it involves, the industrial devastation it enables, “the incalculable cost,” as he puts it in Life is a Miracle, “to other creatures and to ourselves.”

Without a full appreciation for life, and for all that sustains life, all the many relationships and little connections that sustain the lives of creatures and our own lives, and allow the life of one place – the sea, the forest, a farm – to be unique and truly marvelous, the idea of “wild life” is never really going to have much grab. And the only things we will find really marvelous will be the machines of our own making, or, even worse, our ability to make and remake them.

Reckoning on a Riot

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Yesterday’s New York Times Week in Review section found sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh wondering why we are not out in the streets, rioting for bread.

You can tell it’s a prospect that gives him a little thrill – or a touch of academic brain fever. Venkatesh’s writing rises above social-scientific banalities only when he’s describing the complete breakdown of social order.

He is sure that if we all stop blogging and texting, twittering and talking on cell phones, and if we can all get over the shame we all feel over the massive credit card debt we all carry — no, really, this seems to be his argument — we will all get in touch with our true feelings again, or at least with the righteous anger we ought to be feeling over AIG bonuses and Chrysler’s nosedive and John Thain’s interior decorating budget; and in the light of that new day we will all rise up and take to the streets.

Not to worry, of course: Professor Venkatesh assures us that there won’t be angry, unruly mobs in the streets bent on mayhem. Why would there be? We will all turn out for a riot, but stay just for good conversation with our fellow citizens, kind of a democratic carnival or street fair, or a big town hall, in which, I guess, unemployed bankers, sinecured academics, Toledo plumbers and everybody else will come to approve a new program of social justice.

Maybe I’ve been living in New York City too long, but I prefer to avoid crowds when I can, especially angry crowds, and I don’t expect people driven to the street by anger suddenly to turn all warm, mushy and benevolent at the sight of fellow sufferers or the prospect of a conversation. Maybe we would all be moved by pity and compassion and realize a sense of shared purpose if we only could come face to face, and acknowledge our pain. But isn’t it just as likely — more likely — that the day of reckoning so eagerly anticipated by Professor Venkatesh wouldn’t turn out the way he expects?

What the world needs now may be love sweet love; but there will be no easy resolution to the political and social conflicts this economic crisis might generate. Democratic deliberation is above all a habit, one we are out of; concerns about the thing we hold in common — the res publica — have given way, for now, to worries over the losing everything we have, or own. So it is with some regret that I would inform Professor Venkatesh — pace Rodney King — that we probably can’t all just get along; and, what’s more, we probably won’t.