A Gathering of “Space” Rangers

Since today is the 103rd Anniversary of the birth of the National Park Service and we’re into the Service’s second century, it’s a good time to report on another gathering of Rangers – this time with an eye toward the future, a time when there may indeed be Rangers on other worlds.

In July, on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, there was a gathering of  Rangers – “Space Rangers” – at Craters of the Moon National Monument.  This time, an Astronaut, students, and teachers would join the Rangers.

A call came from the Chief of Interpretation and Education – the Chief Naturalist – at Craters of the Moon earlier in the year a.  Ted Stout and I chatted for a while.  Then he got to the point:  “What are you doing on July 20th?”  I’d worked with Ted in National Park Service days, and later done NASA Education work in Idaho, so he suggested I might want to join his celebration at Craters of the Moon.

I have the greatest respect for Ted so said”Sure” and began planning.  Granddaughter Megan lives near Ogden, Utah, so it would be a chance for a real summer vacation:  camping in Nevada, being hosted in Idaho by Ted and Rose Stout (Rose is also a National Park Service Ranger), helping with the Apollo 11 celebration, and visiting Megan.

Just as plans were firming up Ranger Phil Butler, wwho has a deep interest in space exploration, called and asked to come along.  Phil had his own schedule and wishes, so plans had to be redone, but soon enough he arrived in Carson City.  We packed, and headed east and north.  We followed the Pony Express Trail/Lincoln Highway and the California Trail/U.S. 40/U.S. 93 into Idaho – a George R. Stewart route.  After a night camping in a hidden gem of a BLM campground – shared with a horde of Mormon Crickets – and an expensive night in Twin Falls, we arrived at Craters of the Moon.

Craters of the Moon played, and plays, an important role in space exploration.  The Apollo Astronauts trained there, learning to be field geologists.  More recently, major NASA Mars and Astrobiology research was done there, operating out of a portable field lab set up in the park.  So Craters of the Moon is the ONLY National Park Service unit to be a member of the NASA Space Grant Consortium.   This excellent short video from Idaho Public Television tells the story.

Ted asked me to present NASA education activities to students from the Idaho Out Of School Network.  Time was limited and there were many students; but volunteers Solar System Ambassador Natalie MacBeth and Astro Ranger Molly (who does the star parties at the international dark sky park) helped out and the activities went well.

Guest of Honor was Astronaut John Phillips.  Astronaut Phillips traveled in space three times – two Shuttle missions, and a six month expedition on the International Space Station.  He presented a day program in the Visitor Center, a special program for students, and the evening “campfire” program at the park’s outdoor amphitheater.

Due to a tech glitch the evening program started a few minutes late.  Thanks to the delay, the program and the Apollo 11 50th Celebration at Craters of the Moon ended in an unforgettable way.

After he’d finished his talk, Astronaut Phillips said,

“Everyone stand up.

“OK.  Turn 180 degrees and look at the sky.

“That bright fast-moving star is the Space Station.”

Applause rocked the rocks of Craters of the Moon as the ISS traveled a long, slow pass across the southern horizon.

    Ted Stout and Astronaut Phillips    

  Rangers Rose, Phil and Ted

Event over, there was a day or two with Ted and Rose and Phil.  Ted took Phil and I on several explorations, and a couple of hikes into the Idaho Mountains.  At night, there were excellent meals and conversation with Rose and Ted and Phil.   Then Phil and I hit the road again.

It’s always good to see Megan.  And she’d brought a remarkable gift – salt and pepper shakers in the shape of the Apollo Command and Service Module and the Lunar Lander.  A perfect gift for Space Ranger Gramps.

Megan Ashley (Scott), Actress, and Space Ranger Gramps

Back on the road.  Phil and I camped at the BLM campground near Hickison Petroglyphs, where we were soon immersed in a thunderous lightening storm.  The next day, at nearby Spencer Hot Springs  burros and Pronghorns were neighbors.  Pronghorns have been around for 20,000,000 years – a fact that made me think of the vastness of space and time ahead of us as we enter the Age of Space Exploration.

A perfect end for a Space Ranger journey.

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 All during the trip and at the gatherings, George R. Stewart was in mind.  GRS was the mentor who taught the importance of using the viewpoints of the Ranger and the Astronaut to understand Earth, inspiring me to become a Ranger.  So, on this,  the 103rd anniversary of the National Park Service’s founding, I tip my Ranger hat to Stewart. … and the others who helped inspire the NASA-NPS program at Craters of the Moon NM, including Chris McKay, Al Harrison, Doug Owen, Ted Stout, Mary Valleau, Garth Hull, Irene Sterling,  and the sturdy crew of Wider Focus.

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In honor of tomorrow’s Rangers – real Space Rangers – here is a NASA-NPS  book Ted Stout and his Rangers distribute:

What might Rangers do on other worlds?  Perhaps patrol and protect and interpret a site like this one,  as imagined by visionary artist Douglas Shrock – Shrox (who works with NASA’s legendary Astrobiologist Dr. Chris McKay to visualize NASA space concepts):

Used with the artist’s permission.  (You may want to visit his website to see his other work.) 

Onward, into the great OutThere, Rangers.

To See: George R. Stewart’s Whole Earth Vision Realized

George R. Stewart was an “inventor” of the Whole Earth Vision – the recent realization that Earth, in an immense universe, is one small, blue, life-bearing place, only fully understood if it’s explored from two perspectives – that of the ecologist, who studies it from ground level, and that of the astronaut, who examines Earth from space.

Stewart used that vision for the first time in Ordeal By Hunger.  He begins the book by asking the reader to “imagine yourself poised in space” in what we would now call LEO or Low Earth Orbit, about 200 miles up.  In the book’s Foreword he describes northern Nevada precisely, as photos taken from the International Space Station reveal.  (Stewart used the techniques of fiction to make the history dramatic and engaging, and did that so well that some readers still think they’re reading a novel.  They’re not; they’re reading history.)

The book then moves into the ecologist’s point of view, ground level, as Stewart makes the case that the Donner Party’s tragedy was the result of the party’s ignorance of the ecosystems it passed through.  At the book’s end, he writes, “It should be obvious…I consider the land a character in the work.”  The land, of course, is the ecosystem.

Today, most of us can wander our ecosystems easily.  So far, the perspective of the astronaut is restricted to a lucky few.  But – would Stewart not love this? – we can watch Earth from LEO on a continuous feed, here.

NASA Strategic Planner Jesco von Puttkamer suggested we are now living in the “New Enlightenment of Spaceflight.”    That Enlightenment began with Stewart’s Whole Earth Vision.  The New Enlightenment expanded its reach exponentially with the first photos of the Whole Earth from space, most dramatically “Earthrise” from Apollo 8. von Puttkamer’s slogan for the age, borrowed by Star Trek for the series’ first movie, is

Space:  The Human Adventure is Just Beginning

Today, we know Stewart’s pioneering Whole Earth vision from both perspectives – of the land, and from LEO.  We have joined von Puttkamer’s New Enlightenment of Spaceflight, and gained Stewart’s Whole Earth vision and have a greater understanding of and love for our home planet.

We have become enlightened.

Image Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University

George R. Stewart’s Prophetic Whole Earth Vision, and a Canadian Coin

In a recent issue of the excellent CBC New website,  journalist Bob MacDonald describes a new Canadian coin that honors the 25th anniversary of the first spaceflight by a female Canadian Scientist-Astronaut, Dr. Roberta Bondar.  The coin, beautifully-designed, has two remarkable features. Concave on one side and convex on the other, it carries a sense of the roundness of Earth.  And its colorful rendering of the image-map of Canada from space glows in the dark to reveal patterns of man-made lights in that northern country.  (The Canadians were also kind enough to include a good part of their neighboring nation to the south on the coin.)

Since this is a silver coin, durably made, it will be a long-lasting — “a deep time” — reminder of North American geography as it appeared the early 21st century.

In his article, MacDonald emphasizes what he seems to consider a new idea – that space and conservation are two sides of the same coin.  The article is well-written, and will open up that idea for the first time to many readers.  But the idea is NOT new – NASA is tasked, to do ecological research.  And that, in part, is certainly because George R.Stewart, nearly a quarter of a century before the NASA organic act was written, and 33 years before the first Earth Day,  in Ordeal By Hunger and his ecological novels, presented the concept to a massive audience of literate, general readers.

Ordeal By Hunger, written in 1936,  opens with a view of Nevada from orbit so accurately described that when  International Space Station Astronaut Dr. Ed Lu  photographed Nevada from space his images matched Stewart’s words almost exactly.  Stewart’s history of the Donner Party then comes down to Earth, to focus on the role of the ecosystem in the fate of the emigrants.  Thus, he completes what has become known as The Whole Earth vision – understanding Earth from within its ecosystem, and  from without,  as one small, beautiful, place in the universe.

Stewart follows that same approach in his first ecological novel, Storm.  The novel begins with a view of Earth from Earth orbit; moves into the ecosystem to tell its story; then ends by  taking the reader to an imaginary platform on Venus, describing the tiny bright light called Earth from millions of miles away.

Once again George R. Stewart proved to be a prophet, and trailblazer for our time.  His books helped lay the foundation for the view of Earth found on the new Canadian coin, and for our sense of the Whole Earth.

George R. Stewart’s Ordeal By Hunger — First Whole Earth work

(PLEASE NOTE:  For some reason, WordPress is not inserting paragraph breaks in part of this post.  Please read it with that understanding.  Thanks, DMS.)

 

I believe George R. Stewart’s Ordeal By Hunger was the most important book of the twentieth century.

The book is the history of one of the great calamities of the Westward movement, the stuff of nightmares:  The story of the Donner Party.

The Donner Party, from an eastern ecosystem, made the mistake of listening to trail salesman Lansford W. Hastings.  Hastings’ “shortcut”  delayed the Party and the worst winter in many years pinned them down at what is now called Donner Lake, just below what is now known as Donner Pass.    Rescue parties tried to bring food in and survivors out, but the harsh winter meant that they would have limited success.  Members of the Donner Party tried to escape by climbing through the deep snow over the 7000+ foot pass, but most were forced back by weather and deep snow.  Eventually, their food gone, those at the camps by the lake, and some of those stranded by snow on their way to Sutter’s Fort were forced to eat human flesh.  Those acts of necessary cannibalism insured that the story of the Donner Party would become a major part of the story of the Westward Movement, and the settlement of California, even though it was actually a small blip on the historic record.

One of the survivors, Virginia Reed, summed it up in a letter to a relative written a year later:

I have not wrote to you half the trouble we have had but I have wrote enough to let you know that you don’t know what trouble is. But thank God we have all got through and the only family that did not eat human flesh. We have left everything but I don’t care for that. We have got through with our lives but Don’t let this letter dishearten anybody. Never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.

“Never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can” is one of the great lessons of the Westward Movement.

But that’s not the reason I believe this history is critical to understanding our time.  It’s the two epiphanies Stewart had while working on the book, which he wrote into it.

Books  write themselves, even though authors do the hard slogging of getting things down on paper.  Stewart had a dickens of a time trying to put the book together.   There was the long trek across the plains, through the Rockies and the Wasatch, and over the deserts; there was the barrier of the Sierra Nevada (the name means “Snowy Mountains, which should have been a warning); there were the two winter camps; there were the various parties of emigrants braving the Sierra Nevada, seeking safety; there were the several parties of rescuers braving those same storms as they headed into the Sierra Nevada — the story was all over the map of eastern central California.

That gave Stewart an idea — he’d map the story.  Stewart loved maps, and he loved to make maps.  So they were the perfect tool to help him put the story together.  As he mapped out the various events, he realized that he could use a technique of English to make the story compelling:  He would follow one group until there was a critical moment, and then move to another group, similarly following them to a  crisis, and then return to the first group to reveal how things had worked out.  So readers would turn the pages quickly, eager to see what would happen next to each of the groups.

But mapping showed Stewart something much more important:  The importance of the geography of the story in its eventual outcome.  As Stewart put it, in the book, “It should be obvious to the reader that I consider the land to be a character in the work.”  That simple statement, and the understanding it contains, reveal one of the great moments in western thought.  Shakespeare told readers that the world is simply a stage for humans to act on.  Stewart is telling his readers – us – that Shakespeare is wrong.  The world – Earth, and its ecosystems – “The land” – is the principal player in any human drama.  It is a remarkable vision, and it prepared readers for the great paradigm shift of the twentieth century, the idea that an ecological view of the world is the correct one.

What defeated the Donners, and defined the character of the human players in this tale, was their ignorance of ecosystems.  They were easterners, and had no sense of the ecological reality of deserts or high  “Snowy Mountains.”

Once he’d come to understand the ecological viewpoint, the idea that the land is a character, Stewart seems to have decided to emphasize that in the beginning of the book.   Most histories of this type would begin with the party starting their ill-fated journey west, or with an overview of the Westward Movement up to that.  But Stewart begins with an unprecedented look at northern Nevada and eastern California from the perspective of space.

To observe the scene of this story, the reader must for a moment imagine himself …raised in space some hundreds of miles above a spot near the center of the state of Nevada.  …Far to his left, westward, the onlooker from the sky just catches the glint of the Pacific Ocean; far to his right, on the eastern horizon, high peaks of the Rockies forming the Continental Divide cut off his view.  Between horizons lie thirteen degrees of longitude, a thousand miles from east to west…

He continues, describing the Earth from space so accurately that features in Astronaut photos of the area can easily be identified.

Stewart did this, mind you, 24 years before anyone actually saw that view.  But in writing the Astronaut’s perspective into the opening of the work, he was making the point that all human experience took place in small ecological microcosms in that huge macrocosm of Earth.   Now, of course, we have moved away from Earth, and the idea is not unusual.  But he was the first to define our stories as Earth stories, and Earth ecosystem stories.  A quarter of a century before humans actually saw the view, and began to speak of “Earth,” he was preparing us.

In writing the book, Stewart developed two remarkable ideas.

The Whole Earth concept – the idea that Earth  from afar is small and beautiful; and from the surface a complex ecological and geographic system; and which defines the actions of all life, including human life – can be said to be the defining idea of the twentieth century So that century should be known as the first Whole Earth century.  It was the time when we began to see ourselves as a raft of life on a very special place in the universe, and it was the first time humans  did so.   Ordeal By Hunger, the first Whole Earth book, prepared us for this great change in our understanding.

For the first time in human experience, a book was written which educated its readers to the understanding that Earth and its ecosystems are the principle protagonists in any human drama.

Once he’d experienced the Whole Earth epiphany, and shared it with readers, Stewart would continue writing books around that truth.  Over the next decade or so, he would invent a “literature of the land.”  He would invent the Whole Earth novel, and the ecological novel, and would refine them until he created his masterwork, Earth Abides.  In doing this work, he would build upon this most important of twentieth century books, the first book to see and share the Whole Earth idea.  Thus, George R. Stewart would shape the twentieth century.