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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| I sure talk about the Moon a lot. We're coming up on another Full Moon, by some reckonings the Pink Moon, the first Full Moon after the Northern Hemisphere Spring Equinox. It's also a culturally significant Full Moon because it marks the start of Pesach, or Passover; and helps to define the timing of Easter. This will occur on Saturday, based on Eastern Standard Time. But this article, from aeon, isn't about Moon lore or cultural observances; quite the opposite. How the Moon became a place  For most of history, the Moon was regarded as a mysterious and powerful object. Then scientists made it into a destination On 25 May 1961, the US president John F Kennedy announced the Apollo programme: a mission to send humans to the Moon and return them safely to Earth within the decade. Specifically, white American male humans, but hey, one small step and all that. The next year, the American geologist Eugene M Shoemaker published an article on what it would take to accomplish the goal in American Scientist. It is an extraordinary document in many ways, but one part of his assessment stands out. ‘None of the detailed information necessary for the selection of sites for manned landing or bases is now available,’ Shoemaker wrote, because there were ‘less than a dozen scientists in the United States’ working on lunar mapping and geology. I had to look it up to be sure, but yeah, this was the same guy who co-discovered Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the one that impacted Jupiter back in the 1990s, right around the time we coincidentally started confirming the existence of exoplanets. That's a lot of astronomy wins for a geologist, especially considering that, technically, "geology" only applies to Earth. I think that's a word it's safe to expand the definition of, though; otherwise, we'll have selenology, areology, and any number of other Greek-rooted world names attached to -ology. The problem becomes especially apparent when you consider we also have geography, geometry, and geophysics. Some sources refer to him as an astrogeologist; I'm not really picky about the wording in this case, as long as we all understand what's meant, though technically "astro-" refers to stars, not moons or planets. Being picky about that would cast doubt on "astronaut" as a concept. Incidentally, he apparently died in a car crash in 1997, and some of his ashes got sent to the Moon with a probe that crashed into its south pole region. A fitting memorial, if you ask me. But I digress. The Moon is a place and a destination – but this was not always the case. Well, it was certainly a destination for Eugene M. Shoemaker. Or part of him, anyway. To geographers and anthropologists, ‘place’ is a useful concept. A place is a collision between human culture and physical space. People transform their physical environment, and it transforms them. People tell stories about physical spaces that make people feel a certain way about that space. And people build, adding to a space and transforming it even further. So, this is a situation where science, technology, anthropology, folklore, mythology, linguistics, engineering, and psychology (and probably a few other ologies) meet. In other words, candy for Waltz. Now, you might be thinking, as I did, "But science fiction treated other worlds as 'places' long before we sent white male American humans to the Moon." And you'd be right (because, of course, I was). The key is in the definition of 'place' I just quoted from the article: the Moon became a real place, as opposed to the speculative place it had in science fiction and fantasy: Centuries ago, a major reconceptualisation took place that made it possible for many to imagine the Moon as a world in the first place. New technologies enabled early scientists to slowly begin the process of mapping the lunar surface, and to eventually weave narratives about its history. Their observations and theories laid the groundwork for others to imagine the Moon as a rich world and a possible destination. Then, in the 1960s, the place-making practices of these scientists suddenly became practical knowledge, enabling the first visitors to arrive safely on the lunar surface. One might argue that we lost something with that, like the folklore and mythology bits. But we gained something, too, and didn't really lose the folklore (though some of it, as folklore is wont to do, changed). For much of history, the Moon was a mythological and mathematical object. People regarded the Moon as a deity or an abstract power and, at the same time, precisely charted its movement. It seemed to influence events around us, and it behaved in mysterious ways. The connection between the Moon and tides was clear long before Newton explained gravity enough to demonstrate a causal relationship. There were some who thought about trips to the Moon. Stories in religious traditions across the world tell of people travelling to the Moon. There were some thinkers before and after Aristotle who imagined that there were more worlds than just Earth. The ancient atomists discussed the possibility of worlds other than Earth, while other Greeks discussed the possibility of life on the Moon. This included Plutarch, who wrote about the Moon as both mythical and a physical object. But, to the extent that the Moon was thought about as a place, the notion was largely speculative or religious. I sometimes wonder if, had we not had the big shiny phasey thing in the sky, our perception of space travel might have been different. The only other big thing in the sky is the Sun; all the other relatively nearby objects resolve to little more than dots: Venus, Mars, etc. I suspect that the presence of a visible disc, with discernible features even, might have served as a stepping-stone to imagining those other dots as worlds, once the telescope could start us seeing them as discs, too. It would certainly have made mythology and folklore a lot different, not having a Moon. The rest of the article is basically a brief (well, not so brief because it's aeon, but brief in comparison to human history) recap of our cultural relationship with the Moon. I don't really have much else to comment on, but I found it an interesting read, especially to see how our understanding has changed over time. |
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