Joseph Wood Krutch: a prophecy?

"An obviously unfriendly reporter revealed not long ago that President Eisenhower had ordered removed from the White House lawn the squirrels which were interfering with his putting green, and even so trivial an incident is a straw in the wind.   To hold golf courses obviously more important than squirrels indicates a tiny but significant decision.  It points toward a coming world where there will be more golf courses and fewer wild plants as well as wild animals--hence to a world less interesting and less rich for those who would rather hunt a flower or watch the scamperings of a squirrel than chivy a rubber ball over a close-cropped grass plot.

The late David Fairchild who was responsible for the introduction of so many useful and beautiful plants into the United States, tells the story of an army officer assigned to an office building in Miami during the First World War.

'I haven't got anyting but human beings around me in that building where I spend my days.  Aside from the floor and the ceiling, the doors and windows and desk and some chairs there isn't anything but people.

The other evening when I was feeling particularly fed up with the monotony of the place, I went into the laboratory and as I was washing my hands a cockroach ran up the wall. "Thank God for a cockroach!" I said to myself.  "I'm glad there something alive besides human beings in this building."'

It may well be with such small consolations that the nature-lover of the not too distant future will be compelled to content himself.  Cockroaches will not easily be exterminated."

-- Joseph Wood Krutch --
from Baja California and the Geography of Hope


I'm not sure why Krutch referred to the reporter as "obviously unfriendly."   I wouldn't be surprised to discover to learn that most Americans would agree with President Eisenhower's decision.  After all, to put squirrels above golf courses, to consider that other creatures' survival needs might be as important as, if not more important than, human pleasures is ridiculous, isn't it?

Just how significant  is the organic world (of which we are apart, which so many conveniently forget or ignore) in our new electronic, digital world?  

Joseph Wood Krutch on specialists and amateurs, Pt. 2

More from Joseph Wood Krutch on specialists and amateurs.  He's found a kindred soul among the specialists.

"The late William Morton Wheeler, one of the the most competent of specialists in a highly specialized field, spoke closer to my own condition when he wrote, not only sympathetically but even enviously, of those who like me have assumed no responsibility:

Our intellects will never be equal to exhausting biological reality.  Why animals and plants are as they are, we shall never know; of how they have come to be what they are, our knowledge will always be extremely fragmentary, because we are dealing only with the recent phases of an immense and complicated history, most of the records of which are lost beyond all chance of recovery; but that organisms are as they are, that apart from the members of our own species, they are our only companions in an infinite and unsympathetic waste of electrons, planets, nebulae and suns, is a perennial joy and consolation.  We shall all be happier if we were less completely obsessed by problems and somewhat more accessible to the aesthetic and emotional appeal of our materials, and it is doubtful whether, in the end, the growth of biological science would be appreciably retarded.  It quite saddens me to think that when I cross the Styx, I may find myself among so many professional biologists, condemned to keep on trying to solve problems, and that Pluto, or whoever is in charge down there now, may condemn me to sit forever trying to identify specimens from my own specific and generic diagnoses, while the amateur entomologists, who have not been damned professors, are permitted to roam at will among the fragrant asphodels of the Elysian meadows, netting gorgeous, ghostly butterflies until the end of time. 

I felt the same way when I was teaching various introductory literature courses.  While the prescribed works were excellent and noteworthy, I felt that I was missing out on be able to read other works not included in the curriculum.   Now, having retired, I am frustrated because I can read only one book at a time.   Happiness is good health, a bad memory, and a long TBR list. 

Joseph Wood Krutch: on specialists and amateurs, Pt 1

"Many specialists are very contemptuous of such activities as mine--but not all of them are.  Some steal time from their exacting pursuits to be amateurs at something else or even, like me, of things in general.  Thus they recapture some of the spirit of the old naturalists who, whether they were professionals like Linnaeus or hobbyists like Gilbert White, lived at at time when there seemed nothing absurd about taking all nature as one's province.  And there are even some, eminent in their specialty, who experience a certain nostalgia for the days when the burden of accumulated knowledge was less heavy.  "The road," said Cervantes, "is always better than the inn" and discovering is more fun than catching up with what has been discovered.

Your amateur is delightfully if perhaps almost sinfully free of responsibility and can spread himself as thin as he likes over the vast field of nature.  There are few places not covered with concrete or trod into dust where he does not find something to look at.  Best of all, perhaps, is the fact that he feels no pressing obligation to "add something to the sum of human knowledge."  He is quite satisfied when he adds something to his knowledge.  And if he keeps his field wide enough he will remain so ignorant that he may do exactly that at intervals very gratifyingly short."

-- Joseph Wood Krutch --
from Baja California and the Geography of Hope


Is Krutch saying that specialists aren't necessary or that they are wasting their time?  Who is more useful--the specialist or the amateur--to humanity?   It seems at first glance that the specialist is obviously the most important or useful for they "add something to the sum of human knowledge."  What does an amateur like Joseph Wood Krutch provide that is comparable? 

What is the difference between the specialist and the amateur?  Are both important?

I had a friend who was an amateur railroader.  He built everything he could from raw materials--wood, metal, paint.  He would buy the plans for railroad cars and equipment and buildings and painstaking cut and and sanded and painted.  He worked on a huge model train layout in his basement.  One day he decided to turn his hobby into gainful employment.  He solicited work from architects to build models for the jobs they were trying to get.  He opened up a small shop in which he constructed various small objects such as models for display.  He prospered and eventually had to hire someone to work in the shop.  Shortly after he began this enterprise, he stopped work on the layout in his basement.  I lost track of him years later, and now I wonder if he ever went back to it.  What happened to his hobby?

Is this something like what happens to someone who is fascinated by nature, wanders about fields, forests, ponds,  marshes or beaches, who eventually studies it in school, and becomes a specialist, but no longer wanders those fields and forests and wet places that fascinated him long ago?

Joseph Wood Krutch: the way of the desert and the way of the jungle

"The way of the desert and the way of the jungle represent the two opposite methods of reaching stability at two extremes of density.  In the jungle there is plenty of everything life needs except mere space, and it is not for the want of anything else that individuals die or that races have any limit set to their proliferation.  Everything is on top of everything else;  there is no cranny which is not both occupied and disputed. At every moment, war to the death rages fiercely.  The place left vacant by any creature that dies is seized almost instantly by another, and life seems to suffer from nothing except too favorable an environment.  In the desert, on the other hand, it is the environment itself which serves as the limiting factor.  To some extent the struggle of creature against creature is mitigated, though it is of course not abolished even in the vegetable kingdom.  For the plant which in the one place would be strangled to death by its neighbor dies a thirsty seedling in the desert because that same neighbor has drawn the scant moisture from the spot of earth out of which is was attempting to spring.

Sometimes  it seems to me that, of the two methods, the desert's is the kindlier and that, though I have never seen the jungle, it is there rather than here that I should feel the sense of discomfort (or worse) which the desert produces in some of those who experience it for the first time.  Certainly I am little aware of any such discomfort.  I wonder if it does not augur ill for the human race that its techniques have enabled it to produce for itself a sort of artificial, technological jungle in which too many people can live somehow--if not well--and where, therefore, as in the jungle, the struggle inevitably becomes ultimately the struggle of man against man and not the struggle of man against nature."

-- Joseph Wood Krutch --
from Baja California and the Geography of Hope


Having lived in Tucson, Arizona for over forty years now, and only a few miles from where Krutch himself spent his later years, I have to agree with him.  I have never seen a jungle, except in pictures, but I know I would much rather live here in a city in the desert than one in a jungle. 

Reading the headlines everyday, both local and international, leads me to suspect that Krutch, unfortunately, is right.  The human race now lives in a jungle of its own making. Perhaps that Garden of Eden was really a desert.

Joseph Wood Krutch, more thougts on Joy

J0seph Wood Krutch in his Baja California and the Geography of Hope expresses some unusual ideas, (well, they are unusual today) on joy and its presence in nature. Obviously this is not a scientific view of nature, for when was the last time anyone heard a scientist say anything about joy in nature--that would be unscientific. But, fortunately, Krutch is not a scientist and therefore he can see this in nature--in plants and animals.

Joy is the one thing of which indisputably the healthy animal, and even the healthy plant, gives us an example. And we need them to remind us that beauty and joy can come of their own accord when we let them. The geranium on the tenement window and the orchid in the florist's shop, the poodle on the leash and the goldfish in the bowl, are better than nothing. In the consciousness of the city-dweller, they ought to play a part no less essential than that of the sleek chrome chair and the reproductions of Braque and Miro.

Here [in Baja California] I have, literally, God's plenty. Everything reminds me that man is an incident in nature rather than, as one comes to suppose in the city, that the natural is, at most, an incident, surviving precariously in a man-made world. If I do on my own a little of that peeping and botanizing which Wordsworth scorned, I think that I profit less from what I learn about nature than I do from what I should prefer to call the example she sets me--the example, I mean, of confidence, of serenity, and, above all, of joy. In the city, perhaps especially in the city of today, one may pass whole weeks without meeting a single joyous person or seeing a single joyous thing. One may meet laughter there, and wit--sometimes, perhaps, a fragment of wisdom. These are all good things which I would not willingly do without. But joyousness, as distinguished from diversion and amusement and recreation, is so rare that a whole philosophy has been developed to make a virtue out of its absence.

This world, we are told, is a terrible place, and it is wicked not to be almost continuously aware of the fact. Diversion in limited quantities is permissible as a temporary relaxation, but moral indignation should be the staple of any human life, properly spent. Yet it seems to me that Joy and Love, increasingly fading from human experience, are the two most important things in the world, and that if one must be indignant about something, the fact that they are so rare is the thing most worth of indignation.

-- Joseph Wood Krutch --
from Baja California and the Geography of Hope

I wonder what would happen if one of the candidates in the primaries being held this Spring of 2012 should begin to criticize The System today because of its limited, materialistic view, that there is something more important than economics and religious prohibitions and struggles for world domination. Just suppose that that candidate began to argue that our outlook on life (and not merely just a particular religious doctrine) and that our relationship to the world we live in is just as important, if not more so, than economics and social controls and world preeminence.

I think that person would labelled a nut. What could be more important than jobs and proper religious behavior and world domination?

Joseph Wood Krutch: November 25, 1893 to May 22, 1970

Beauty and joy are natural things. They are older than man, and they have their source in the natural part of him. Art becomes sterile and the joy of life withers when they become unnatural. If modern urban life is becoming more comfortable, more orderly, more sanitary, and more socially conscious than it ever was before--but if at the same time it also becoming less beautiful (as it seems to me) and less joyous (as it seems to nearly everyone) -- then the deepest reason for that may be its increasing forgetfulness of nature. She is often none of the good things which the city is, but she is almost always, nevertheless, somehow beautiful and somehow joyous.
-- Joseph Wood Krutch--
from Baja California and the Geography of Hope


Krutch seems to feel we are giving up something precious for a life that may be

more comfortable, more orderly, more sanitary, and more socially conscious than it ever was before.

Is this a fair trade or is it even true? Are people as joyous as they have been in the past?




I think perhaps William Wordsworth is saying something very similar here.

The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The wind that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

-- William Wordsworth

Joseph Wood Krutch: more from Baja California

from Baja California

"Even an amateur like myself will seldom lack something to see if he will only look. 'Lift up thine eyes unto the hills' is a religious exhortation. 'Go thou to the ant, thou sluggard,' is a scientific one. And, at least for certain temperaments, it is the more fruitful. Because I obey it, the place where I am is never really the same place two days in succession, and I can take every morning the same short walk down a certain wood road because it is not really the same walk."



I should start up my walking routine again. I can feel my muscles atrophying--spending too much time at the keyboard and too little on my feet. But, I find walking boring, at least in the residential area of Tucson where I have been living for decades. Perhaps I should try Krutch's technique and see if every day does give me a different walk, even if it's the same sidewalks. Look for differences instead of seeing only the same things again and again.

Joseph Wood Krutch: more from Baja California

Once again Joseph Wood Krutch opposes the more traditional attitude and, I must admit, makes some interesting points while doing so.

Too long a view in either time or space makes people miss a great deal that is close at hand, and it is my experience that those who are quickly bored in the country are usually those who lack "the microscopic eye," those to whom "nature" means only "scenery," and "scenery" means only "views." Charles Lamb once declared that he would not much care if he never saw another mountain, and, while I would not by any means go so far, I think I know what he meant. To know nature only that way is like knowing a city only by its skyline. To feel the life of either city or country, one must be actually in it, aware of the excitement and variety of individual lives. People are often blamed because they cannot see the wood for the trees, but that does not seem to me so bad as not seeing trees for the wood.

Several Eastern philosophies talk about mindfulness, which, roughly speaking, means living in the present. Too many people, according to Buddhists and Taoists, spend too much time going over the past and worrying about the future. Instead, we should focus on the present, we should live now, and we should be aware of what we are now doing and where we are now.


"When eating a peach, eat the peach."
Anon

Joseph Wood Krutch: Baja California

Joseph Wood Krutch's Baja California and the Geography of Hope is a very unusual book, in that it's hard to explain just what it is. It's a Sierra Club Publication (copyright 1969), and my copy is a large format paperback book. It's getting rather decrepit, so one of these days I'm going to search for a hard back copy.

It has text by Krutch, some of which comes from other works by him, photos by Eliot Porter, and lines of poetry by Octavio Paz, translated by Muriel Rukeyser. The color photographs are taken in Baja California. I don't know if Paz's poetry is specifically about Baja, but they do seem to be about a desert landscape, so they are appropriate. I'm doing a search now for the book from which Paz's poetry was taken to see if I can learn more. Krutch's text varies: some of the commentaries are about Baja while some seem more to be inspired by Baja than specifically about Baja California.

I am going to make several posts about the book over the next few weeks. Rather than attempting to tell you about the book, I'm going to let Krutch speak for himself. He does a far better job than I ever could. Baja California and the Geography of Hope is part travelogue, part philosophical musings, part societal commentary, and part . . .?


"I can understand how an astronomer may conclude that God is a mathematician. The planets seem to know where they are going and what they are about. Theirs is a formal, unvarying dance which moves in accord with an abstract scheme of delightful regularity; and the mathematical physicist seems to have discovered that the microcosm is, despite the disturbing presence of certain principles suggesting indeterminacy, a good deal like its big brother the system of heavenly bodies. But the world of living things exhibits no such co-operation of part with part, no such subordination of the unit to the whole. The God who planned the well-working machines which function as atom and solar system seems to have had no part in arranging the curiously inefficient society of plants and animals in which everything works against everything else; and the struggle between, let us say, the mouse which would continue its species and the owl which would feed its young goes on inconclusively millennium after millennium."

-- Joseph Wood Krutch --



Los huesos son relampagos
en la noche del cuerpo.
Oh mundo, todo es noche
y la vida es relampago.

Our bones are lightning
in the night of the flesh.
O world, all is night,
life is the lightning.

-- Octavio Paz --


There is much talk today about disturbing the balance of nature or the web of nature or ecological networks, while others use system theory when they talk about the environment. Are these really out there in the environment, in nature, or are these abstract constructs applied by us? I wonder if we lose anything by using these models.

Joseph Wood Krutch and the Boogum Tree

The boogum tree is one of the oddest trees on the planet and is found mainly in Baja California. Following are some comments by Joseph Wood Krutch about the boogum.



"One finds the boogum wild only in Lower California. If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I should not believe it, for it is far more improbable looking as a tree than the giraffe is as an animal. Whether it was christened by some admirer of Lewis Carroll or whether some accident of convergence is responsible for the fact that even the gravest botanical treatises call it by a name which occurs elsewhere only in The Hunting of the Snark, I do not know. In any event, the name is gloriously appropriate because the boogum tree looks far more like something out of Alice or the Snark than like any real tree.

Speaking of the strawberry, Dr. William Butler, a worthy who was one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, made the sage remark, 'Doubtless God could have made a better berry but doubtless God never did.' Doubtless he could have also made a queerer tree than the boogum, but if He did I have never heard of it.

What one sees when one undertakes to contemplate it is an inverted, green-backed cone, six or eight feet high and with the proportions of a carrot. The general effect is rather like a huge taproot that has for some reason grown up into the air instead of down into the earth. From this cone scattered twigs a few inches long project foolishly in all directions. At some seasons a few futile leaves dangle from these twigs, though they were bare when I saw them. Only another Lewis Carroll word will do to describe it; like the borogoves in Alice, it is "mimsy"--which, as Humpty-Dumpty explains, means both flimsy and miserable.

So inelegant a solution of a problem is seldom achieved or at least seldom persisted in by Nature, who may not be infallible but who has buried most of her mistakes in geologic time, where this one ought to have been forgotten along with some of the equally inadvisable animals who had their regrettable day. The essayist Charles D. Stewart once analyzed the orthodox tree "as an invention," but he did not mention this one which, so far from being a credit to the inventor, looks like one of those unbelievable triumphs of no ingenuity exhibited by the patent office in hopes of raising a smile. To see three of these vegetable monstrosities together--and three together I have seen, one like a chunky carrot, the other two foolishly elongated--is to suspect that some of nature's journeymen had made trees and not made them well, they imitated an organism so abominably. If the time ever comes when the desert no longer seems to me at all strange, I know how I shall remind myself that it is. I shall imagine a mouse-that-never-drinks [the kangaroo rat] resting in the conical shade of a boogum tree."

Joseph Wood Krutch
from Baja California and the Geography of Hope



I have seen a boogum tree. It was shortly after I arrived in Tucson to attend the University of Arizona. I was walking about the campus and came across a small desert garden with several types of cacti and mesquite trees. There was also some thing else there which I knew had to be a boogum. I had never seen one before, but I had read a description of the tree. Nothing else would dare look like that.