The Glint of the Rail

I'm an ecologist. As you can imagine, that's not exactly a very fun profession to be in right now. Every day I have to deal with multiple different crises on multiple fronts- coral reef bleaching, extinctions, habitat destruction on unprecedented scales, and governments that don't really seem to be giving a single shit about any of it.

Do you have any advice for staying resilient and optimistic about the future?

Hi Anonymous Ecologist,

First, I can't express how much I resonate with the way you are feeling. My educational background and career have all been in either biology/ecology or closely adjacent work—and I currently work with a lot of folks doing ecology research.

Here are some other posts I’ve made about this topic that might also be helpful to you. (X) (X)

When I was freshly graduated with my ecology degree, I had a long period where I couldn’t look at a beautiful landscape or endangered animal without prematurely grieving its loss. How much longer until this forest is clear cut or degraded beyond recognition? Will this species be to my kids what the thylacine was to me? I saw only the damage, the invasive species, found flaws in any news of progress. I believed the conservation and environmental work was worth doing for its own sake, but deep down I often did not truly believe it would ever be enough to slow or push back the tide of destruction.

But the thing is, I was wrong. Not just philosophically, but my belief that everything was just circling the drain and not enough people cared to make any meaningful progress was demonstrably, factually wrong. Things have gotten better and they can continue to get better in the future, even though it doesn't always feel that way.

Here are some tips that have helped get me out of that hopeless place:

1. Consciously look for and give attention to the good news. Yes, there is damage and backsliding and grief, but I also have stories come across my feed ever day of dam removal, rewilding and reintroductions, species being spotted in places they were previously wiped out for decades, ecosystems bouncing back after receiving protections, grassroots restoration efforts, the list goes on. It’s easy to have a knee jerk “it’s not enough” or “what about X, Y, Z?”, but you do really need to stop and actually feel the hope, joy, and pride when progress is made instead of immediately moving on to the next crisis—no one can live in crisis mode forever without burning out. “Things are a long way from where they need to be” and “we are making progress” are two thoughts that can both be true at the same time.

2. Zoom out and look at the bigger picture. It often takes a lot longer to fix things than break them, and I think that can sometimes make ecological work feel like banging your head against a wall with nothing to show for it. But much like the starlight we see now can be hundreds of years (or much more!) old, in many cases we are just now seeing the major payoffs from decades of previous conservation work. Many of the known and unknown heroes who quietly, patiently did that work did not live to see the full extent of their impact. The light from the work we are doing now—the work you are doing now—may not be visible yet but it’s coming and it will be so bright when it gets here. Just because you’re not seeing it right away doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

3. Look back at historic environment wins. Remember that we used to spray DDT on children at picnics because of how “safe” society considered it. We fought and won against acid rain and chemicals burning a hole in the ozone layer. “Save the Whales” was a pejorative for “naive, unrealistic environmentalist” fifty years ago and now many whale populations are headed towards or even exceeding per-commercial-whaling numbers. Even within my own lifetime, it wasn’t all that long ago that I had never seen an electric car and renewable energy was considered impractically expensive—now I see many electric cars every day and solar is the cheapest energy on Earth. There are species that were fully on life support when I was born that are now surviving and repopulating without human intervention. Things have looked insurmountably bad before and they have gotten better—and the progress we have made today looks a lot more encouraging when you look back at where we started.

4. Tell yourself hopeful stories. I’m sure this one is going to make some people raise their eyebrows because it sounds a bit cheesy, but it really does help to imagine the world you are working towards instead of just what you are fighting against. This used to make me super uncomfortable, it felt almost wrong or painful to imagine things actually getting that much better. But it gets easier. Imagine the cheering and celebration when we close the last coal plant. Imagine a little girl many generations in the future, about to snorkel a coral reef, with her dive instructor telling the story of all the people and all the work it took for that reef to still exist. I used to imagine how special a day it would be when it was finally safe to release frog species decimated by chytrid back into the wild—but it turns out we are already working on that decades earlier than I would have expected!

5. Recognize that hope is a more effective psychological strategy for progress than cynicism. Research has found that our society tends to view cynicism as a more rational and even sometimes more moral worldview, but the opposite is true. Cynics actually perform worse on cognitive and social tasks and they are less likely to vote, protest, or take positive action. Hope for Cynics by Jamil Zaki is a really excellent book about this. Sometimes on bad days I have to remind myself that hope is a strategy and to act as if my actions will make a difference even if I'm not really feeling it that day--if you act that way long enough your brain will start to believe it.

6. Speaking of books, I personally find it really helpful to read books by smart and qualified people who work in the interface between climate/environmental science and psychology/hope. I’ve been meaning to make a post with my ever growing book list, but Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie and A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety by Sarah Ray are two excellent ones off the top of my head.

I really hope this is helpful to you. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you for the work that you do. I can almost guarantee it is having a bigger impact than you know. <3

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.

Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.

I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don't have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what's new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.

People can be real big assholes about contemporary classical music, because they're holding it up to the absolute cream of the crop from the past 400 years. That's a lot of time to pick from! There's a reason you've heard Mozart's Requiem but not his Symphony No. 1... because we don't perform the stuff that isn't good. I've gone to (and performed in) plenty of modern pieces that are not seeing the light of heaven, but there's something incredibly special about being one of the first people to experience (or perform!!!) something that's hot off the presses and GREAT. I'll be 95 years old and telling whatever young musicians I'm working with that I was at the very first Met performance of Fire Shut Up In Your Bones, for instance.

Kilroy Was Here!

He’s engraved in stone in the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC – back in a small alcove where very few people have seen it. For the WWII generation, this will bring back memories. For younger folks, it’s a bit of trivia that is an intrinsic part of American history and legend.

Anyone born between 1913 to about 1950, is very familiar with Kilroy. No one knew why he was so well known….but everybody seemed to get into it. It was the fad of its time!

          At the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC

So who was Kilroy?

In 1946 the American Transit Association, through its radio program, “Speak to America,” sponsored a nationwide contest to find the real Kilroy….now a larger-than-life legend of just-ended World War II….offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine article.

Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy from Halifax, Massachusetts, had credible and verifiable evidence of his identity.

“Kilroy” was a 46-year old shipyard worker during World War II (1941-1945) who worked as a quality assurance checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts (a major shipbuilder for the United States Navy for a century until the 1980s).  

His job was to go around and check on the number of rivets completed. (Rivets held ships together before the advent of modern welding techniques.) Riveters were on piece work wages….so they got paid by the rivet. He would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi-waxed lumber chalk (similar to crayon), so the rivets wouldn’t be counted more than once.

                                     A warship hull with rivets

When Kilroy went off duty, the riveters would surreptitiously erase the mark. Later, an off-shift inspector would come through and count the rivets a second time, resulting in double pay for the riveters!

One day Kilroy’s boss called him into his office. The foreman was upset about unusually high wages being “earned” by riveters, and asked him to investigate. It was then he realized what had been going on. 

The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didn’t lend themselves to lugging around a paint can and brush, so Kilroy decided to stick with the waxy chalk. He continued to put his check mark on each job he inspected, but added ”KILROY WAS HERE!“ in king-sized letters next to the check….and eventually added the sketch of the guy with the long nose peering over the fence….and that became part of the Kilroy message.

   Kilroy’s original shipyard inspection “trademark” during World War II

Once he did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks.

Ordinarily the rivets and chalk marks would have been covered up with paint. With World War II on in full swing, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast that there wasn’t time to paint them. As a result, Kilroy’s inspection "trademark” was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships the yard produced.

His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen, because they picked it up and spread it all over the European and the Pacific war zones.

Before war’s end, “Kilroy” had been here, there, and everywhere on the long hauls to Berlin and Tokyo. 

To the troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery; all they knew for sure was that someone named Kilroy had “been there first.” As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.

As World War II wore on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for coming invasions by U.S. troops (and thus, presumably, were the first GI’s there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops painting over the Kilroy logo!

Kilroy became the U.S. super-GI who had always “already been” wherever GIs went. It became a challenge to place the logo in the most unlikely places imaginable. (It is said to now be atop Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty, the underside of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and even scrawled in the dust on the moon by the American astronauts who walked there between 1969 and 1972.

In 1945, as World War II was ending, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Allied leaders Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill at the Potsdam Conference. It’s first occupant was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide (in Russian), “Who is Kilroy?”

To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters. He won the trolley car….which he attached to the Kilroy home and used to provide living quarters for six of the family’s nine children….thereby solving what had become an acute housing crisis for the Kilroys.

                     The new addition to the Kilroy family home.

                                        *          *          *          *

And the tradition continues into the 21st century…

In 2011 outside the now-late-Osama Bin Laden’s hideaway house in Abbottabad, Pakistan….shortly after the al-Qaida-terrorist was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs. 

>>Note: The Kilroy graffiti on the southwest wall of the Bin Laden compound pictured above was real (not digitally altered with Microsoft Paint, as postulated by some). The entire compound was leveled in 2012 for redevelopment by a Pakistani company as an amusement park….and to avoid it becoming a shrine to Bin Laden’s nefarious memory.

                                         *          *          *          *

A personal note….

My Dad’s trademark signature on cards, letters and notes to my sisters and I for the first 50 or so years of our lives (until we lost him to cancer) was to add the image of “Kilroy" at the end. We kids never ceased to get a thrill out of this….even as we evolved into adulthood. 

To this day, the “Kilroy” image brings back a vivid image of my awesome Dad into my head….and my heart!

Dad: This one’s for you!

The blurb said the shot was taken in Granada, Spain, by Agneta Fondén.  No other info, so I have no idea how old, etc.  There's a game (from 1988) that uses a similar pattern on one of its pieces, but this could predate it by at least a thousand years  — or not.  But the pattern intrigued me, so I made a texture map and used Blender's geometry nodes (no generative AI) to set up a hexagon grid with random rotations for the tiles:

That's all done with a single design:

You'd think this would have a name, right?  (For its historical use as an architectural / decor tile — although I've found out more about its use in games, that's not what I'm looking for.)  Like the Penroses do (and no, it's not one of those).  But I've had no luck finding it, or any other info.  Any (human only, please) help?