Seventeen years have passed since Terry Tempest Williams gave us Refuge, an indelible meditation on her mother’s battle with cancer and the devastation wrought on a bird sanctuary by rising waters in the Great Salt Lake.
Since then, fans of this Utah native and naturalist have come to expect a common thread through her books: the artful weaving of observations from the natural world with the labyrinths of the human experience.
For Williams, this is not a stock formula. It’s her sublime art.
Now she delivers Finding Beauty in a Broken World, an ambitious, even audacious, work.
Williams takes us from the breathtaking, Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, Italy — a city she has spent time in — and uses them as a metaphor for two communities, a besieged prairie dog colony in Utah and a village in Rwanda, where she helped build a memorial to victims of a 1994 genocide that killed 1 million in that African country.
That’s quite a juxtaposition, all delivered against the not-so-tacit backdrop of the Iraq war and the Bush administration’s foreign-policy adventures.
Although Williams made her reputation as a naturalist and defender of the West’s wild places, in recent years she has turned her eye toward the broader world.
Still, in her view, genocide in Rwanda can be equated to the war waged against the prairie dog, and vice versa. It is all about humanity’s inability to recognize, at least in a sustained and universal way, the worth of communities.
The Utah prairie dog is one of six species in the world viewed as most likely to become extinct in the 21st century. Of course, this assessment was made in 1999, before global warming and its impact on polar bears was fully appreciated.
Prairie dogs have long endured “varmint” status in the West. Ranchers despise them because cattle and horses have a way of stumbling into their holes, breaking legs. Beyond that, they were viewed as vermin that spread vermin.
Now they are threatened just as much by the tract homes sprouting in the New West. So these creatures, pack animals who communicate in distinct dialects, are torched and gassed in their holes.
“We are all complicit,” Williams writes. “A rising population is settling in subdivisions. The land scraped bare. The prairie dog towns and villages are being displaced. Sad, sorry state of habitation. They are prisoners on their own reservations.”
The Rwandan village Williams visits is Rugerero. Today it is home to massacre survivors from three villages that were erased from the Earth. The violence was tribal, Hutu killing Tutsi. Much of the butchering was done with machetes. As one aid volunteer informs Williams: “That’s Rwanda.”
So much savagery amid such beauty. Here is Williams limning the Rwandan landscape: “We arrive in Gisenyi at dusk. Smoke. Shadows. Figures captured in headlights. Lake Kivu is a long reflective mirror. I am reminded of scenes captured in a ring I once had as a child; inside a plastic orb were the silhouettes of palms against a twilight sky made of iridescent butterfly wings, turquoise blue. We are surrounded by enormous mountains, a crown of peaks, snow-tipped and jagged. And then, suddenly, an eerie red glow is emanating from the Congo. An active volcano.”
We live among such a disconnect in this world: apart from nature, apart from each other. It’s a comfort to have Williams in our midst, reminding us of the mosaic formed by every creature on Earth.
But that comfort is also our challenge.
“Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision,” Williams tells us. “Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together.”
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and