MAKE A RECORD
83 Gay Ruby and her family lived there: Personal interviews with Gay Ruby.
84 Professor Stewart’s Community Lake Ice Collaboration: For more on this impressive, long-running citizen science initiative, see, https://www.lakeicefreeze.com/
84 statistics for Madison’s Lake Mendota: See, the Wisconsin State Climatology Office, https://climatology.nelson.wisc.edu/first-order-station-climate-data/madison-climate/lake-ice/history-of-ice-freezing-and-thawing-on-lake-mendota/
84 This was the pre-internet era: For a charming history of the Community Lake Ice Collaboration, see Sapna Sharma et. al., “An Introduction to the Community Lake Ice Collaboration,” Limnology and Oceanography Bulletin, May 2023, available at: https://aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/lob.10560
86 an area newspaper published: See Jim Stevens, “Climate warming could alter lake life,” The Lake County Reporter, February 6, 2007. This does not appear to be available online. Gay Ruby shared her physical clipping with me.
86 Magnuson wrote in a paper published in 1990: See John J. Magnuson, “Long-Term Ecological Research and the Invisible Present,” BioScience, July–August 1990, available at: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article-abstract/40/7/495/244616?redirectedFrom=fulltext. I had a lovely conversation with Magnuson in December 2023, during which he expanded on his concept of the “invisible present” and how, in combination with “shifting baseline syndrome” and “the extinction of experience,” it was a perfect example of an emergent idea. Magnuson told me that originally the term was a way of encapsulating the importance of long-term ecological research. “The idea of the invisible present was a way of having an elevator conversation with a politician or somebody making a decision about your grant.” He was passionate about the importance of citizen science and ensuring that academic research is made easily available to the public—its own form of bearing witness. “It’s not enough to collect data. You have to make the data available, and you have to use that data to influence public decision making.”
87 Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: I picked up this line from another Magnuson paper, “Seeing the Invisible Present and Place: From Years to Centuries with Lake Ice from Wisconsin to the Northern Hemisphere,” which appears in The Challenges of Long Term Ecological Research, 2021.
87 The research done at National Science Foundation–funded LTER sites: There are now a total of twenty-seven LTER locations, stretching from Arctic Alaska to Florida to Antarctica. See https://lternet.edu/. The future of the LTER program, however, is in doubt due to Trump administration–proposed cuts to the National Science Foundation.
88 has recorded ice observations for more than one thousand lakes: Personal interview with Sapna Sharma and also her research paper cited above.
88 the first writing instrument and to-do list: Archaeologists have found 2,000-year-old shopping lists at the ruins of Roman forts—“chickens: twenty, a hundred apples, if you can find nice ones, a hundred or two hundred eggs.” Some ancient Viking runes were focused on nothing more than provisioning beer and fish.
89 Teachers encourage students to take notes: See Charlotte Hu, “Wy Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning,” Scientific American, February 21, 2024, available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-hand-is-better-for-memory-and-learning/.
89 “Without encoding”: See Restak, page 95.
89 encoding is more than merely paying attention: You can think of this as subconscious meta-cognition: to remember, we need to be prepared to remember. For more, see Zhisen J. Urgolites, et. al., “Spiking activity in the human hippocampus prior to encoding predicts subsequent memory,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 1, 2020. Available at: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2001338117.
90 Exercise and heightened emotions both stimulate: See Salman E Qasim, et. al., “Neuronal activity in the human amygdala and hippocampus enhances emotional memory encoding,” Nature Human Behavior, January 2023, available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11243592/.
90 According to one study: See Keita Umejima, et. al., “Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval,” Frontiers in Behavioral Science, March 2021, available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8017158/pdf/fnbeh-15-634158.pdf.
90 Another investigation found that: See F.R Van der Weel and Audrey Van der Meer, “Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high density EEG study with implications for the classroom,” Frontiers in Psychology, January 2024, available at: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945/full. Please note that subsequent commentary on this paper called into question the rigor of the experiments used in the study.
90 I started keeping a nature-and-garden diary: If beginning from a blank page seems too intimidating, I’d suggest Margaret Renkl’s Leaf, Cloud, Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal (Spiegel & Grau, 2024), which offers helpful prompts for what to record season by season.
91 I have the receipts to prove it: During my reporting in Wisconsin, I spent an afternoon with Gary and Penny Shackelford, a pair of retired doctors who are among the most impressive conservationists I have ever met. Over the decades, Gary and Penny have carefully and conscientiously—and at great expense—rehabilitated a former orchard south of Madison and restored it to prairie. Recently, they gifted the property, Fair Meadows, to the Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance. They are also world-class phenologists; Gary has been keeping a detailed nature diary for several decades now. The entries are made digitally—so much for pen and pencil!—which has allowed him to index the entire corpus. Gary went so far as to teach himself a coding language to come up with a bespoke database. Sandhill crane—go! With AI swiftness, Gary can tell you the exact date, for every single year, on which the species has appeared at Fair Meadows on its spring migration.
92 University of Cambridge geographer Mike Hulme: I nicked this gem from Aldern’s The Weight of Nature (page 34). The full quote is: “The idea of climate change disorients our memories, many of which are profoundly attached to past weather, and unsettles our expectations about the future.” Aldern goes on to write that “climate change causes amnesia.”
92 The autumnal changing of the leaves: See Jeva Lange, “Fall Colors Are Getting Weirder,” Heatmap, October 5, 2023, available at: https://heatmap.news/climate/fall-colors-are-getting-weird. See also “Fall Foliage and Climate Change” from Climate Central: https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/fall-foliage-and-climate-change.
93 what has been dubbed “hydroclimate whiplash”: See Daniel L. Swain, et. al., “Hydroclimate volatility on a warming Earth,” Nature Reviews, January 2025, available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-024-00624-z.
93 as climatologist Andrew Dessler has written: See Andrew Dessler, “Why are climate impacts accelerating so quickly?” The Climate Brink, July 17, 2023, available at: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/why-are-climate-impacts-escalating.
94 Dennis and Joy Krubsack: Personal interviews with Dennis and Joy Krubsack.
96 I heard something similar from Pat Collins: Personal interview with Pat Collins.
97 a whole academic discipline called historical ecology: In the introduction to Issues and Concepts in Historical Ecology (Cambridge University Press, 2018), the textbook editors write, “Historical ecology is neither a discipline nor a theory. It is a research framework.” Point taken. But I think the distinction may be a bit too fine for non-academics.
98 One of the more famous examples: See Alison Flood, “Scientists use Thoreau’s journal notes to track climate change,” The Guardian, March 14, 2012, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/14/henry-david-thoreau-climate-change.
98 I have a set of Thoreau’s journals: I collected this totem, which sits atop one of my bookshelves, during a cleaning of the Sierra Club’s William E. Colby Memorial Library. See The Journal of Henry David Thoreau (Peregrine Smith Books, 1984). The skunk cabbage passage cited here appears in the journal entry for April 2, 1856.
99 These days, skunk cabbage: See Tufts Pollinator Initiative, at https://sites.tufts.edu/pollinators/2020/02/turning-up-the-heat-strange-and-stinky-skunk-cabbage/.
99 the “hunger stones that appeared”: See Jon Henley, “Hunger stones, wrecks and bones: Europe’s drought brings past to surface,” The Guardian, August 19, 2022, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/19/hunger-stones-wrecks-and-bones-europe-drought-brings-past-to-surface. Robert Macfarlane also mentions the hunger stones in the prologue to Is a River Alive? (Norton; 2025).
99 Whalers’ records have proven to be: See Richard King, et. al., “Captain Joy’s Last Voyage,” Earth Island Journal, Summer 2023, available at: https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/magazine/entry/how-data-from-whalers-logbooks-inform-marine-and-climate-research/.
99 the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: See Ayurella Horn-Muller, “How centuries-old whaler logs are filling gaps in our climate knowledge,” Grist, November 2, 2022, available at: https://grist.org/science/how-centuries-old-whaling-logs-are-filling-gaps-in-our-climate-knowledge/.
100 When researches at the University of British Columbia: See John-Paul Ng and William W.L. Cheung, “Signature of climate-induced changes in seafood species served in restaurants,” Environmental Biology of Fishes, April 2022, available at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10641-022-01244-6.
100 the former executive chef at Hotel Vancouver: See Ian Rose, “130-Year-Old Menus Show How Climate Change Is Already Affecting What We Eat,” Hakai, June 27, 2022, available at: https://hakaimagazine.com/news/130-year-old-menus-show-how-climate-change-is-already-affecting-what-we-eat/.
100 In the Kiso Mountains of Central Japan: See Sapna Sharma and John Magnuson, et. al., “Direct observations of ice seasonality reveal changes in climate over the past 320-570 years,” Scientific Reports, April 2016, available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep25061.
101 These kinds of historical records: In the spring of 2025 I spent a couple of hours talking with Daniel Pauly on a bench on the University of British Columbia campus, the peaks of the Canadian Cascades poking out to the north, and he took some credit for the emergence of historical ecology. His original essay about shifting baseline syndrome had argued for “adding history” to a discipline—fisheries science—“that has suffered from lack of historical reflection.” You can draw a straight line from those nineties-era complaints to today’s robust field of historical ecology. There’s an entire chapter on shifting baseline syndrome in Issues and Concepts in Historical Ecology. See also: James Dineen, “Looking More Deeply into the Past to Gauge the Planet’s Future,” Undark, May 18, 2020, available at: https://undark.org/2020/05/18/conservation-science-historical-data/.
101 “The big changes happened a long time ago”: I am reminded of a haunting observation from Barry Lopez, who wrote, “After the last undomesticated stretch of land is brought to heel, there will only records—strips of film and recording tape, computer printouts, mag-azine articles, books, laser-beam surveys—of these immensities. And then any tyrant can tell us what it meant, and in which direction we should go now. . . . And the naturalist . . . will be an orphan. He will become a dealer in myths.” From “The Naturalist,” Orion, October 1, 2001, available at: https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-naturalist/.
102 Milan Kundera called “organized forgetting”: The phrase appears in Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and the full sentence is haunting: “Or is it true that the people will be unable to survive crossing the desert of organized forgetting?” The phrase has been widely borrowed, including by the speculative fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who once used it in reference to the European notion of “discovery,” which requires the fiction that no one knew the place before the colonizers showed up.
102: “Beyond the late Fifties, everything faded”: See George Orwell, 1984 (New American Library, 1981 edition), pages 30 to 32.
102 journalist Louisa Lim reports: See Louisa Lim, “Hong Kong’s Memory Is Being Erased,” The New York Times, April 20, 2023, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/opinion/hong-kong-protest-china-beijing.html.
102 the state has imposed “memory laws”: See Restak, pages 164 to 167.
102 put a gloss on the history of the January 6 insurrection: The tawdry attempt to rewrite the events of January 6 are well known. Smithsonian Institution historians Jon Grinspan and Peter Manseau have made the case for how dangerous this is. “Nothing in our past, no matter how blatant it may seem to us today, is guaranteed eternal condemnation. Enshrining rioters as heroes could be done fairly quickly.” See, “How Will History Remember Jan. 6?” The New York Times, January 9, 2022, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/opinion/january-6-report-history.html.
102 Between 2022 and 2024: See Grace Hagerman, “Censorship by Another Name,” NEA Today, October 31, 2024, available at https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/censorship-another-name. See also: “America’s Censored Classrooms 2022” via PEN America at https://pen.org/report/americas-censored-classrooms/.
102 laws intended to constrict the teaching of American history: Anti-fascist scholar Jason Stanley warns how dangerous this is in his book, Erasing History (Atria, 2024), when in the preface he writes, “By removing the uprisings from the curriculum, the authorities leave students with the impression that the status quo has never been—and cannot be—challenged.”
103 One of the most important human rights groups: Memorial was one of the co-recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022. Though outlawed in Russia, it continues to do its work.
103 In China, “underground historians”: See Ian Johnson, “China Keeps Trying to Crush Them. Their Numbers Keep Growing,” The New York Times, September 24, 2023, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/opinion/china-underground-historians.html
103 nature is political: In Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit writes (page 29) that “Nature itself is immensely political. The apoliticalness of nature [is] itself a political production.” It’s worth a detour to recall the political role that nature plays in Orwell’s writings. Many of Orwell’s fearful imaginings—Big Brother, doublethink, newsspeak—by now have become cultural shorthand. Less well remembered are the many ways in which nature is a vehicle for Winston’s rebellion. Winston’s first treasonous tryst with his lover occurs in the countryside, in a secluded grove “misty with bluebells” and full of dove song. His most prized possession is a piece of coral encased in glass, a paperweight. That fragment of nature is so precious because it resides outside the bounds of the police state. Again and again, Winston tries to return to his most beloved memory: the bucolic English countryside in the years before the Party subsumed everything. He thinks of this as the “Golden Country.” The place, as Orwell describes it, is the apotheosis of a what today is considered now-lost pastoral England: “It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot track wandering across it and a molehill here and there.”
105 glaciers have long been symbols of permanence: For more on glaciers’ role in diverse cultures, see Magnason’s Time and Water and Julie Cruikshank’s Do Glaciers Listen? (UBC Press, 2005).
105 Glacier National Park in Montana: No less an authority than the U.S. Geological Survey reports that all the glaciers in the park will likely be gone as early as 2030. See: https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/70160343
105 taking pictures of glaciers from the same viewpoint: Paintings serve a similar function. In 2022, British landscape artist James Hart Dyke followed in the footsteps of the French artist Gabriel Loppé to recreate a painting of Switzerland’s Mont Blanc. In the decades since Loppé’s 1873 ascent, the scene had changed dramatically. “I couldn’t but be aware of the huge changes that have happened across the years since,” Dyke said. See: Joanna Moorhead, “Artist captures the impact of climate crisis over 150 years on Mont Blanc,” The Guardian, September 2, 2023, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/02/artist-captures-the-impact-of-climate-crisis-over-150-years-on-mont-blanc.
105 the universal language of photography: The National Park Service has long used repeat photography to help track landscape change over time. See: https://www.nps.gov/klgo/learn/nature/repeatphotography.htm
106 It’s hard to argue with a picture: Audio recordings can also provide indelible evidence of past environmental conditions. One of the most impressive repositories of natural soundscape audio recordings comes from Bernie Krause, who has spent decades capturing what he calls the “biophony”—the sounds of the living world. His vast recordings form an auditory account of how landscapes are being degraded; while natural sounds like birds and water have diminished, artificial sounds like trains and airplanes have grown louder. I recommend Bernie’s book, Voices of the Wild (Yale University Press; 2015). See also: Janelle Zara, “The sound ecologist capturing a disappearing world,” The Guardian, June 14, 2023, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/jun/14/bernie-krause-sound-ecologist-disappearing-world.
106 a twenty-foot-long metal dragon: See: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/majestic-dragon-sculpture-in-yreka-california--120963939961852203/.
106 Shasta is home to the longest glacier: For more on Shasta’s glacier, see: https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/mount-shasta/science/geology-and-history-mount-shasta.
106 A “colossal cone of a burned-out volcano”: See Clarence King, “Active Glaciers in the United States,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1871. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1871/03/active-glaciers-within-the-united-states/536868/
106 There is a photo: See Andrew G. Fountain, “The Scientific Discovery of Glaciers in the American West,” Annals of American Association of Geographers, January 2016, available at: https://glaciers.pdx.edu/fountain/MyPapers/Fountain2017_ScientificDiscoveryGlaciers%20AmericanWest.pdf.
106 what drew Phil Rhodes to the mountain: Personal interviews with Phil Rhodes.
107 a book titled Exploring Glaciers—With a Camera: The small, instructive book by A. E. Harrison was published by Sierra Club Books in 1960, well before most people had heard of climate change. Even then, its author understood that glacier re-photography would have historical value: “The glacier story is always changing, but it can be caught and preserved with the proper use of a camera.”
109 seasonal ranger named Forrest Coots: Personal interviews with Forrest Coots.
112 A great many of the Shasta glacier photos: No one really wanted to talk about the lost photos, and certainly no one wanted to point fingers. But I ultimately understood that the photos, after being shot by Forrest and his brother-in-law (the lead climbing ranger for the Mount Shasta Avalanche Center), had been stored on a thumb drive and then somehow misplaced. When I asked Hasan Basagic about this, he said, “It’s like, Who’s got the photos?”
113 Andrew Fountain, an eminent glaciologist: Personal interview with Andrew Fountain.
113 sit unseen on data servers and hard drives: Sorry to say that Andrew Fountain and Phil Rhodes are in good company. Many important photo archives are at risk of being lost. According to the Washington Post, “Without a clear plan, a photographer’s archive can become a burden rather than a legacy, leaving heirs—spouses, children or executors—to navigate complex decisions about storage, access and preservation.” See Kira Pollack, “Photos Are Disappearing, One Archive at a Time,” Washington Post, March 10, 2025, available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2025/photography-history-archive-photojournalism/.
113 If you go to the site’s glacier re-photo project page: See: https://rephoto.glaciers.us/.
113 If a glacier melts off a mountain: Of course, Andrew Fountain’s website isn’t the only depository of glacier re-photography. The US Geological Survey also hosts several repeat photography sites to “quantify changes in glaciers over time.” This is among the best one-click resources: https://www.usgs.gov/centers/norock/science/repeat-photography-project. But most of us aren’t going to be paid government scientists. The point here is that grassroots, community-driven natural history is more difficult than it may first appear.
