I’ve been a musician longer than I’ve been a journalist, but recording took a back seat to writing, until I had a "lucky" stroke. This post explains why music matters in pursuit of sanity and sustainability.
I love reading about your musical career and listening to your music. I read all your Dot Earth columns during those years when the NYT, it seems to me, was devolving from environmental news reporting to the climate agenda promotion of today. You cast a wide net and continue to, inspired, it seems to me, by your love of nature and her critters That includes understanding sustainability and the sense of loss we all experience as part of the bitter sweet song of life and death and not just political rivalry. “To hold the middle is always of prudence” seems to have few devotees and few rewards in today's partisan battlegrounds. Please continue to sing, bear, and forbear. We need your voice!
Doug, thanks for this. I'm eager to get a sense of who's out there - missing the dynamics of Dot Earth in an online world that seems more about posturing than connecting these days. This helps.
Hi Andy - I just got home from Australia and saw this. It'd be delightful to be on Sustain with the Tempestry folks. I'm a big fan and I believe many of them know and admire my project. Did you receive a copy of the new book on our project? I asked publisher to send one. I can get them to send again if you didn't receive. You'll see there's an image of a Tempestry piece in one of the essays about craft and conservation. One of the intersections of their work and ours is that both projects are almost wholly done by women and have been hugely successful in reaching female audiences about climate change. We started our project in 2005 - at the time I had to explain to people what the term 'global warming' meant and most people didn't believe it was happening at all. In the 17 years since the sea change (pun intended) has been immense. fyi: I am a science writer/communicator and I got into doing this science+art work because I saw that mainstream scicomm was really failing to reach women. When not crocheting coral reefs, I write books about the history of physics, which is almost all about men's work (as you well know). So in my life in sccicomm I inhabit 2 very different worlds with very gendered audiences... I think this is an aspect of scicomm worth discussing too.
We'll definitely do a Sustain What show on this. Here's a fun moment from my virtual meetup with Tempestry: https://twitter.com/Revkin/status/1407153190143938562 (because I moved to Maine book may have gotten mis-routed; I'll email you).
Andy - lovely to read about your dual journey through science journalism and music. Mine has been through science journalism and craft. Music also is a sublime kind of craft. I think of life as an opportunity to balance the conceptual and the material, the cerebral and the manual. My Crochet Coral Reef project comes out of this attempt to balance and in some sense synthesize these dual impulses, embodied in math+craft-based-art. And like your (late) insight about the value of collaboration, I've found with the Crochet Reef project that collaborating with 20,000 people has produced work that's far beyond what any individual artist could achieve. In solidarity, margaretw www.crochetcoralreef.org
You've prompted me to plan a Sustain What webcast on this kind of conservation communication. I'd love to have you on with the folks behind the Tempestry Project spreading a community of climate knitters. They were on once but we more is better! Exploring Climate Visualization Frontiers on #ShareYourStripes Day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYYSxUk53sM
I love reading about your musical career and listening to your music. I read all your Dot Earth columns during those years when the NYT, it seems to me, was devolving from environmental news reporting to the climate agenda promotion of today. You cast a wide net and continue to, inspired, it seems to me, by your love of nature and her critters That includes understanding sustainability and the sense of loss we all experience as part of the bitter sweet song of life and death and not just political rivalry. “To hold the middle is always of prudence” seems to have few devotees and few rewards in today's partisan battlegrounds. Please continue to sing, bear, and forbear. We need your voice!
Doug, thanks for this. I'm eager to get a sense of who's out there - missing the dynamics of Dot Earth in an online world that seems more about posturing than connecting these days. This helps.
Hi Andy - I just got home from Australia and saw this. It'd be delightful to be on Sustain with the Tempestry folks. I'm a big fan and I believe many of them know and admire my project. Did you receive a copy of the new book on our project? I asked publisher to send one. I can get them to send again if you didn't receive. You'll see there's an image of a Tempestry piece in one of the essays about craft and conservation. One of the intersections of their work and ours is that both projects are almost wholly done by women and have been hugely successful in reaching female audiences about climate change. We started our project in 2005 - at the time I had to explain to people what the term 'global warming' meant and most people didn't believe it was happening at all. In the 17 years since the sea change (pun intended) has been immense. fyi: I am a science writer/communicator and I got into doing this science+art work because I saw that mainstream scicomm was really failing to reach women. When not crocheting coral reefs, I write books about the history of physics, which is almost all about men's work (as you well know). So in my life in sccicomm I inhabit 2 very different worlds with very gendered audiences... I think this is an aspect of scicomm worth discussing too.
We'll definitely do a Sustain What show on this. Here's a fun moment from my virtual meetup with Tempestry: https://twitter.com/Revkin/status/1407153190143938562 (because I moved to Maine book may have gotten mis-routed; I'll email you).
Nice interview.
Andy - lovely to read about your dual journey through science journalism and music. Mine has been through science journalism and craft. Music also is a sublime kind of craft. I think of life as an opportunity to balance the conceptual and the material, the cerebral and the manual. My Crochet Coral Reef project comes out of this attempt to balance and in some sense synthesize these dual impulses, embodied in math+craft-based-art. And like your (late) insight about the value of collaboration, I've found with the Crochet Reef project that collaborating with 20,000 people has produced work that's far beyond what any individual artist could achieve. In solidarity, margaretw www.crochetcoralreef.org
You've prompted me to plan a Sustain What webcast on this kind of conservation communication. I'd love to have you on with the folks behind the Tempestry Project spreading a community of climate knitters. They were on once but we more is better! Exploring Climate Visualization Frontiers on #ShareYourStripes Day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYYSxUk53sM