I’m disappointed to note that my brief fling with Jim Gurney’s “Art by Committee” has come to an end, now that Jim has put the monthly challenge on an indefinite hiatus (giving him more time to focus on his fascinating ongoing tour of art techniques and great artists, I note with admiration). There are lots of fish in the sea, of course, and Illustration Friday looks like a good replacement.

Illo-Friday offers a challenge that is more open-ended than Jim’s: rather than a page of text or a business card, it offers only a word. From there, your artistic mind is free to roam — so long as you get your picture in before the following Friday. This week’s topic is “propagate”, and you can see above what I did with it. It was certainly an interesting exercise: I started by attempting to depict one meaning of the word, and found when I was part way through that I had captured two.

Detail from James Ensor's "The Tower of Lissewege" (1890)

It is by now old news that blogging has forever changed the nature of how information is generated and consumed, but the full ramifications of this change continue to play themselves out all around us today — and will go on doing so for some time yet. The latest area to be transformed is the global war for public opinion over the issue of climate change. As my friend Jeet Heer argues in a fascinating piece in this weekend’s Globe and Mail (”Climategate’s guerrilla warriors: pesky foes or careful watchdogs?“), climate change skeptics have found their greatest influence to lie not in peer reviewed journals or congressional hearings but in blogs written by passionate amateurs — sometimes highly intelligent ones — who are determined to subject even the smallest component of the international climate change assessment process to scrutiny and, once in a while, disproof.

Yet despite the increasing amounts of media attention being paid to their work, the skeptics’ approach suffers from at least one critical weakness:

The key objection to the work of [such] bloggers is that they are engaged in an epic game of nitpicking: zeroing in on minor technical issues while ignoring the massive and converging lines of evidence that are coming in from many disciplines. To read their online work is to enter a dank, claustrophobic universe where obsessive personalities talk endlessly about small building blocks – Yamal Peninsula trees, bristlecones, weather stations – the removal of which will somehow topple the entire edifice of climate science. Lost in the blogging world is any sense of proportion, or the idea that science is built on cumulative work in many fields, the scientists say.

Reading this reminded me of an incident from fifteen years ago. Within weeks of moving our year-old (and at that stage, politically conservative) magazine Gravitas to Toronto after winning a grant from a major Canadian foundation, I was contacted by an enthusiastic libertarian who wanted to buy me a drink. Sitting down with him in a bar, he immediately cut to the chase and explained how he and a lawyer had been working for years to prove that federal income tax was unconstitutional. As evidence, he gave me a folder of materials and newsletters to take home and read at my leisure. There was an ardent light in his eyes, but not being impolite enough to simply bolt, I asked him what he expected to happen if he succeeded in his quest. “The government would get rid of the income tax,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Really?” I asked. “The feds would just give up on all those billions of dollars of revenue if you beat them in court?”

He hardly blinked. “Yes. It would be unconstitutional. They’d have to.” Something in my expression must have changed then, because he suddenly followed this up by saying, “You think I’m crazy.”

“No, of course not,” I said quickly, and began maneuvering the meeting toward a conclusion. But I wasn’t lying. Even now I’m convinced he was perfectly sane. I think he was an intelligent and earnest man intensely dedicated to a mission, but also a man entirely lacking in wisdom or perspective.

From such clever and motivated men, God save us all.

In [computer-based climate] models, the number of possible variables is near infinite, while our understanding of the natural processes underlying each variable is in its infancy at best. Meanwhile, the unrelenting logic of chaotic systems, which declares that one can’t possibly predict the future state of such a system without being impossibly accurate about its initial starting conditions, leaves science at a loss. [...]

This uncertainty, of course, has spawned endless scientific and political debate about the existence and nature of climate change. But Wohlforth wisely points out that though we can’t create models that eliminate (or even reduce) the number of uncertainties, we can at least choose to “rank important certainties above trivial unknowns.” After all, we do understand the dynamics of the mechanism that causes global warming, and we do understand the importance of greenhouse gases as a determinant of our planet’s temperature, an importance second only to the sun. The global climate is like a massive machine with banks of labeled dials. We can’t know for sure what the machine will produce when all the dials are turned in different directions, but we do know that we’re deliberately cranking the second-biggest dial — the one labeled “atmospheric CO2 content” — far beyond any previous setting. And in doing so, we’re performing an irreversible experiment with the only planet we’ve got.

The Fate of Nature can of course be pre-ordered on Amazon. If I end up reviewing it for one of the tree-based papers, I’ll be sure to let you know.

I had a bit of a crisis a couple of weeks back. I’d been working diligently on this whole “learning to draw” project for five and a half months, and had steadily worked my way through ups and downs to a point where I could say that my skills had progressed from “really very bad” to “mediocre”. This was a significant source of personal pride for me, as I hadn’t been sure when I started that I would manage to reach any higher level of artistic competence at all. I was feeling pretty good, frankly.

Then I watched Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary on Valentino.

It was such a little thing really, hardly five seconds of the film. The designer is discussing an idea for a new dress. He picks up his pen and runs it down a sheet of paper in an undulating line. Another vertical line follows, then a handful of quick horizontals. The shot is over, the film moves on. But in that short time, with those few strokes, Valentino has perfectly depicted the clothed female form.

Inspired, I sat down with my sketchpad and tried the same thing. Utter failure: the figure a jumble of incorrect proportions and lines seemingly formed more of random hand jitters than of elegant curves. I excused this by reminding myself that I was still inexperienced at drawing bodies. The next time I sat down I decided to draw a face instead — this being a subject that I’m far more confident about — but again, as Valentino would, I intended to draw a face without a reference, and with a pen (no going back and erasing mistakes) rather than a pencil. A daredevil, I.

Failure again — less catastrophic, to be sure, but failure nonetheless. I wallowed in a surge of self-doubt. My so-called progress was an illusion! How can it be real, I asked myself, if I cannot even draw a smooth and confident line — the basic grammar, the “See Dick run”, of art? I was in kindergarten still.

I’m old enough now that I didn’t for more than a moment think about hurling my sketching kit in the garbage, but I did resolve to downgrade my activity to a weekend-only pursuit. This left me free to reconnect with my writing again, which was a welcome return to form both for myself and for the blog. As it happens I didn’t pick up my pencils at all for a good two weeks or so. I read and wrote and watched movies. I didn’t draw a thing.

It was the break I needed. This past weekend I started to feel the itch again, so I sat down with my sketchbook and laptop, found an interesting-looking person on Flickr, and gave it a shot. The result is the sketch at the top of this post. It’s a little smudgy looking — mainly from the soaking-through of ink from my pen experiments on the previous page of the sketchbook — but overall I was surprised and pleased with it. The drawing came together easily, and with a greater feeling of confidence and precision than I had felt in all of the past six months of drawing practice. I was particularly happy with the fact that I managed to get the eyes and brows to work together to convey a sense of the woman’s alert anxiety as she walks down a city street. It’s not immensely better than my previous work, of course, but it is more assured — and that’s the more important thing.

I’ll end with a glimpse of where I started, way back in August 2009. I use “started” advisedly, since the contour line drawn through the eyes and around the head indicates that I had already learned something about construction. But nevertheless it’s the first drawing in my sketchbook, so I’ll grant it the honour of representing the beginning of things. Heck, maybe I should give him a name?

There is a kind of long-term shock that comes with the realization that the landscape around one’s own home is being altered beyond recovery. Psychologically, after all, a landscape is a permanent thing — hills and forests and paths are unchanging things to a child, and even when one moves away in adulthood they are assumed to remain protected, inviolate. Increasingly, of course, this assumption is wrong: the relentless spread of housing developments, roads, and shopping centres means that many people in the industrialized world face a high probability of losing the landscapes they remember as children. To some extent the shock lies in the simple unexpectedness of the change.

But the shock has a second aspect to it. Though a person’s ownership rights end at the buried metal stakes marking the edges of his property, the definition of “home” is not so easily to delineate. Home is a mental construction, and can easily include both a family’s house and the far-off hillside that the parents gazed at, cups of tea in hand, upon rising each day. Accordingly, the hillside’s destruction under the teeth of mechanized shovels can be disturbing in the same way (if not with the same intensity) as if hoodlums had broken into the house when the family was away on holiday, smashing up the furniture and spray-painting obscenities on the walls.

This phenomenon is well-described in a thought-provoking essay on “eco-psychology” in last week’s New York Times Magazine. Daniel B. Smith begins the piece with a compelling description of the plight of the residents of the Upper Hunter Valley, a beautiful horse-breeding and wine-growing area in Australia’s New South Wales, now blighted by air and water pollution brought on by the expansion of export-driven coal mining operations. Smith observes that the residents were “anxious, unsettled, despairing, depressed — just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them.” Glenn Albrecht, a professor of sustainability at Perth’s Murdoch University, coined the term solastalgia (from the Latin for “comfort” and the Greek for “pain”) to describe “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault.” A homesickness afflicting those still at home.

Though Albrecht uses a neologism, the phenomenon itself is neither new nor confined to academic journals. J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, published over half a century ago now, is suffused with its author’s love for the natural environment of Middle Earth in all of its particularity and locality — from the domesticated hills and fields of the Shire to the hostile wild dignity of Eriador and the Misty Mountains — and with an equally pervasive mood of sadness for the impending or actual losses that threaten it. Of all of Tolkein’s races, the Elves have the most fundamental connection to nature, and they are forever burdened by the knowledge that they are destined to one day depart Middle Earth. “The love of the Elves for their land and their works is deeper than the deeps of the Sea,” the Elf queen Galadriel tells Frodo, “and their regret is undying and cannot ever wholly be assuaged.”

Indeed, though the epic plot reaches its climax with Frodo’s arrival at the Cracks of Doom, it is after the destruction of the great ring and of Sauron’s earthly power that some of the story’s most poignant moments occur. With victory celebrations and the long journey home from Gondor behind them, Frodo and the hobbits finally return to the Shire — only to find it horribly altered.

The travellers trotted on, and as the sun began to sink towards the White Downs far away on the western horizon they came to Bywater by its wide pool; and there they had their first really painful shock. This was Frodo and Sam’s own country, and they found out now that they cared about it more than any other place in the world. Many of the houses that they had known were missing. Some seemed to have been burned down… Worse, there was a whole line of ugly new houses all along Pool Side, where the Hobbiton Road ran close to the bank. An avenue of trees had stood there. They were all gone. And looking with dismay up the road towards Bag End they saw a tall chimney of brick in the distance. It was pouring out black smoke into the evening air.

It is a vision of industrial and urban “progress” in a place that should know nothing of the sort. And as the hobbits draw closer to Frodo’s ancestral home at Bag End, the scene only gets worse:

It was one of the saddest hours in their lives. The great chimney rose up before them; and as they drew near the old village across the Water, through rows of new mean houses along each side of the road, they saw the new mill in all its frowning and dirty ugliness: a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a steaming and stinking overflow. All along the Bywater Road every tree had been felled.

“New mean houses” is a powerful little phrase, connoting as it does a sense of cheapness and ugliness, and simultaneously one of callousness and narrow-mindedness — the sort of spiritual impoverishment that comes with the pursuit of wealth over all other values. Ironically, however, the corruption of the Shire is the work of the disgraced wizard Saruman — now known to his henchmen and the Shire hobbits by the mobster-like name of “Sharkey” — who is motivated not by money but by vengeance and spite. By playing on the greed of a few of the locals, he has inflicted on the Shire a smaller-scale — but more personally wounding — version of the industrial destruction he previously inflicted on the land around Isengard.

Once it had been fair and green, and through it the Isen flowed… It was not so now. Beneath the walls of Isengard there were still acres tilled by the slaves of Saruman; but most of the valley had become a wilderness of weeds and thorns… No trees grew there; but among the rank grasses could still be seen the burned and axe-hewn stumps of ancient groves. It was a sad country, silent now but for the stony noise of quick waters. Smokes and steams drifted in sullen clouds and lurked in the hollows.

Tolkein himself was quite open in describing the roots of this story line, and although he ends with yet another of his reminders that his novels are not to be treated as allegories, the fact that he devoted the final words of the second edition’s Forward to the topic of environmental damage indicate its importance in his heart:

‘The Scouring of the Shire’… has indeed some basis in experience, though slender (for the economic situation was entirely different), and much further back. The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motor-cars where rare objects (I had never seen one) and men where still building suburban railways. Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important. I never liked the looks of the Young miller, but his father, the Old miller, had a black beard, and he was not named Sandyman.

After Saruman’s final defeat, Frodo’s servant and friend Sam Gamgee begins to heal the Shire with the aid of a box of earth he had been given by Galadriel in Lothlórien. It has been pointed out by environmentally-oriented literary critics that the theme of “stewardship” is woven throughout Tolkein’s depiction of the relationship of sentient creatures to Middle Earth itself — a virtue exemplified by the tree-shepherding Ents of Fangorn Forest — and that this theme is in turn undergirded by Tolkein’s deeply-held Catholic faith. There is indeed something particularly powerful in the thought that the world has been given to us to take care of, and something particularly distressing in the realization of how greatly we have failed in this charge. In this sense, it seems that the concept of solastalgia doesn’t go quite far enough, for lying beneath our personal anguish at environmental loss, perhaps, are feelings not just of anxiety and depression, but of guilt and shame too. And these are emotions that can be assuaged only by making things right again.

My contribution to James Gurney’s latest “Art by Committee” challenge. The assignment was to illustrate the following extract from a science fiction novel manuscript:

This one was a great learning exercise from a composition point of view, driving me to rough out several possible scenes before finally choosing a close-up of Billy’s face — and even then I experimented with just how close the close-up should be. Billy, I thought, is a man trying bravely to cope with an unanticipated glacier of indifference from a formerly close female friend. And this being the near-future, he’s staring into the unforgiving lens of a laptop camera while he wages this internal struggle.

Yet another argument against videophones, in my opinion. Dating is hard enough without that.

Co-option of the Santa myth by a military organization intent on improving its brand image is hardly a shocking development in a century-long cultural evolution that has taken us from handmade toys and apples in old stockings to the multi-billion-dollar global multimedia marketing onslaught that is Christmas today. Rather, what bothers me is that our well-meaning efforts to integrate Santa Claus into our high-tech civilization are undermining what small sense of enchantment still lives in the hearts of modern children.

Our world is a physical one, and integrating Santa into it means making him physical too. Sending jet fighters to “escort” him on his Christmas Eve rounds, for example, implies that his sleigh and reindeer team are solid enough to be tracked on radar and that they fly low and slow enough for man-made aircraft to accompany them. Similarly, the post office’s free service for delivering children’s letters to the North Pole assumes that Santa’s workshop is a fixed location with at least an airstrip for landing cargo planes full of mail.

When I was a child, using Canada Post didn’t even occur to my parents. I did write actual letters to Santa (in one of them, I asked for super powers for my entire family and even for my cat, generous little soul that I was), but I was told that the way to get my letter to him was to burn it in the fireplace. This made perfect sense to me. Though I believed completely in a Santa Claus, no part of my belief required him to physically receive a piece of paper with writing on it. The letter-smoke went up our chimney, and somehow he just knew what I had written.

Santa’s physical reality was never assumed. True, the milk and cookies that my sister and I put out for him in the evening always disappeared overnight. Yet at the same time we were well aware that our chimney (we had a Franklin wood stove for a fireplace with a nine-inch diameter steel pipe carrying the smoke up the main shaft) was far too small for a human being to squeeze through it. And landing a reindeer team on the icy and sharply peaked roof of our farmhouse was out of the question. But for some reason we never thought too hard about such problems. They seemed beside the point. The Santa of our imaginations never required a great deal of coherence to seem real.

By contrast, what the materializing of the myth leads to is a depressingly literal and simplistic form of imaginative experience. Material things, after all, either exist or do not exist. You believe in them, or you don’t. A child who surprises his parents putting presents under the tree thus goes from wholehearted belief to full-scale disbelief in one jump, with no room for gradualism or nuance. Once the “truth” is revealed, the whole thing must seem like a confusing and bitter lie to many kids.

But immaterial things never have to go away suddenly or even completely. They can move from “certainly so” to “probably not” without having to ever quite reach “no such thing”. We don’t have to consciously believe in ghosts to suspect in the dead of night that maybe they do exist at some level. We don’t have to proclaim a belief in God to be surprised by the possibility of grace while staring into a particularly beautiful sunrise. Just so, if we never believed Santa to be a physical creature, there would be no need for him to vanish for us all at once — and no single piece of evidence would be able to kick the legs out from under the myth. Like grownups, children are resourceful, and are quite capable of dealing with situations of cognitive dissonance by adjusting their beliefs to new realities, so long as those beliefs are not constructed in a static, materialist fashion. Realizing that our parents are the ones putting our presents under the tree and consuming the milk and cookies doesn’t need to mean that Santa Claus is an out and out lie.

To live with us successfully in a complex world, myths require ambiguity, vagueness, and a good amount of flexibility. They also benefit from peace and quiet, as rare as that is today. In a silent room, after all, our ears can play tricks on us. We might fancy that we hear a phone ringing somewhere far off, or that we’ve somehow caught a single word out of an otherwise unheard conversation. If we’re children, and if it’s just after lights out on Christmas Eve, then if we listen as hard as we can we might faintly hear sleigh bells, or even, if we’re very lucky, the sound of hooves in snow.

The real magic, as always, is in our minds.

What are you still doing here? Go!