Happy Earth Day!

To celebrate Earth Day, I’m recycling this post (originally from last June)

It’s a beautiful day. Go outside and hug a tree!

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Have you ever looked at one of those massive, towering Douglas firs or western red cedars—the kind with roots that grip the forest floor like giant toes and crowns that disappear high in the sky—and wondered to yourself…what stories could this tree tell?

(A forest sketch I did while pondering my novel “The Hollow Cedar“)

 

Vulnerable new life

Every tree has its own story to tell. A new seedling faces a thousand dangers every day in the wild, unpredictable forest.

A Douglas fir seedling and beetle I painted for a signage project at Federation Forest.

 

The few who make it

The true forest giants—the ones that live for hundreds of years—have something to tell us about success in life…about being a survivor, and about beauty and strength in old age.

Six hundred years later, the seedling and its neighbors tower over a bull elk.

 

It all fits together

Life in a mature forest seems to go on forever, with layer upon layer of living beings—from the teeming soil to the bustling canopy. Some life-forms are tiny, ephemeral, nearly invisible. Others seem impossibly big. It’s a study in contrasts.

 

Where do we fit in?

I may be biased, but the forests of the Pacific Northwest are the most beautiful, fascinating places on earth. In any season, they are enjoyable—but when I’m in an old-growth forest on a bright summer day, I want to grow roots, sink them deep into the forest floor, and stay there forever.

A snippet of a working sketch for “The Hollow Cedar“.

 

What are you doing to celebrate the Earth today?

Adventures in Storytelling

I suppose it’s a good thing for an artist/writer to have an active imagination, but when I was writing The Hollow Cedar, the story seemed to take over my reality for a while. I became deeply immersed in the world I was creating.

It’s not unusual for authors to get wrapped up in their work—it’s probably one reason we like writing so much. It’s trippy.

When I was first planning The Hollow Cedar, I dreamed of telling the story through words and pictures—true illustrated fiction, the kind that hasn’t been done much since it fell out of favor in the early 20th century. The Hollow Cedar is a novel-length book aimed at early-young-adult readers, so it wouldn’t be a child’s picture-book, and I didn’t want to do a panel-style graphic novel, either. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to use illustrations to best serve the story—to intensify the immersive reading experience.

 

THE MAGIC OF READING

A Google search of ‘what is reading?’ will come up with a ton of academic discussions on the subject. But, for people who love to read, it feels more like magic. When you ‘get into’ a book, something happens in your head, almost like entering a meditative or hypnotic state. The words on the page seem to melt away and you enter another world. There’s science behind it, of course. Your brain is making mental connections between each printed word, its associated meaning and the warehouse of accumulated data in your own brain—your own imagination. Synapses fire, and the magic begins.

A good writer helps you get into this magical place. Once you’re there, the words on the page are like hypnotic suggestions. Dropped into your mental storehouse, each word can expand into whole volumes of meaning, and then, you’re off on a trip down the long pathways of your own mind, with the writer as your guide. You go deeper and deeper into the story until it feels like you’re right there with the characters: sword-fighting, or mountain-climbing, or having your first kiss.

So, once you’re there, the last thing a writer wants is a distraction that pulls the reader out of the experience. Reading, like hypnotism, requires a certain amount of concentration.

So, what to illustrate to help the reader enter deeper into their own imaginations? The story of the Hollow Cedar is quite visual, with settings ranging from the Amazon jungle to a Pacific Northwest old-growth forest. There are six main characters plus a dog and slew of wild animals and a fair bit of action. There were a lot of directions I could have taken with the artwork.

Ultimately, I decided I wanted the illustrations to serve as ‘portals’ the reader would enter as they begin down the pathway into the reading experience. The illustrations would fill in the gaps in the reader’s mental warehouse—they will be a springboard into the magic imaginative place you go to when you’re reading.

 

NARRATIVE STYLE ILLUSTRATIONS

Here are some samples of illustrations I’ve done for various interpretive sign projects. These illustrations were paired with two or three brief sentences of text and are a different sort of illustration than I plan for The Hollow Cedar. (You didn’t really think I would show you the actual Hollow Cedar illustrations, did you?)

I did this illustration of pioneers on the Oregon Trail for the Idaho Power Company project.

 

This illustration I did for the BLM shows a shelter cabin in the Alaskan wilderness in the early days.

 

Now when I look at this illustration for Oregon State Parks, I worry that the little voyageur is going to accidentally shoot his own head off.

 

This illustration on an interpretive display for the U.S. Forest Service in Michigan shows how one of their historical pioneer cabins was used in the Depression era.

Stopping the Ape and Moving Forward to Nature

I’ve spent most of my professional life trying to help people appreciate nature. In the field of nature interpretation, you try to provoke interest in a meaningful way. You only get a few seconds of a viewer’s time, but if you do a good job, you will have ignited a spark of natural curiosity and hopefully they will walk away wanting to learn more on their own.

A wetland illustration I did for Idaho Power Company.

I started this blog and wrote my young-adult novel as an extension of my profession, as a way to take people and especially children, deeper into nature. I’ve been lucky in my career—getting to spend time illustrating and writing about fascinating animals and plants and ecological relationships. But anyone working with environmental subjects knows it can get depressing, too…for obvious reasons. And in interpretation circles, we have begun to realize we have yet another type of threat to nature. In my neighborhood in West Seattle, that threat recently appeared into the middle of Lincoln Park, a magical place of towering firs and cedars, sweeping views of Puget Sound and the Olympic Range, beaches, and a thriving community of plants, wildlife and people. It’s a terrible plan and has infuriated a lot of people, but I worry it may be just the tip of the iceberg.

A watercolor sketch of the beach at Lincoln Park with Puget Sound, the Olympics and rain.

 

In interpretation, you learn very quickly that it doesn’t work to talk only about plants and animals. You have to get personal—show your audience how nature relates directly to them. Let’s face it, we’re all pretty stuck on ourselves.

But, most of our audience used to come pre-packaged with a simple love of nature, usually something they acquired in childhood, and it wasn’t that hard to spark their interest and curiosity. Sadly, the baby-boomers were probably the last full generation of Americans that grew up running wild in nature…climbing trees and stomping through creeks, turning over logs and jumping off rocks…sometimes getting into trouble, most times getting ourselves out of it. We learned a lot from those experiences—that nature was a place of exciting discovery, a place where we could test ourselves, work things out alone or in cooperation with our friends, and explore a world of other creatures that share the planet.

 

A child alone in the woods…almost never seen anymore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few decades ago, our society seemed to have decided practically overnight that the world, and nature in particular, had become a much too dangerous place for children to roam freely. Kids today spend most of their time indoors and plugged in, or in highly structured and supervised activities. Too often, they are not given the opportunity to develop the deep love of nature that we did. Add to that the depressing and overwhelming messages of “Planet Earth is Dying, and YOU Must Save it!” underlying most anything to do with the environment these days, and you have one big societal push straight indoors.

 

Nature Deficit Disorder

Richard Louv has studied and written extensively about this social condition in his book “The Last Child in the Woods”. As a society, over-hyped media reports and other manufactured fears literally scared Americans out of the woods. Louv now writes and lectures about the physical and emotional ills caused by lack of daily, unstructured outdoor activity and contact with nature. Obesity, depression, and behavioral problems have been conclusively linked to what he has termed “Nature Deficit Disorder”, a non-medical condition that many of us, especially children, suffer from. Turns out, daily contact with nature is very much a basic human need.

Now nature interpreters are realizing our jobs are getting more difficult—our audience just got a lot tougher. We still only get 3 seconds to make our case for nature, but now we must communicate it to a group of people that society has been conditioning to look for solace, entertainment, and meaning almost anywhere but in nature. Younger generations know a lot about science and nature and the environment…but the value of just being in nature seems lost on many of them.

 

The Ape

It’s sad that a corporation specializing in high-impact recreation installations—mostly built in city and town parks across the world, in remnant forests or natural areas of financially strapped communities—named itself GoApe. I cannot think of a more insensitive name choice than ape—one of the most imperiled forest-dwelling family of animals on the planet. Apes are symbols of so much that is wrong with the world…all of it human-caused. I think it says something about a company that is essentially a forest resource-extraction interest to choose such a name.

 

This illustration was used by the opposition to the Go Ape proposal.

 

For background on GoApe’s high-impact development scheme for Lincoln Park, visit: West Seattle Blog

Last night, a furious group of over 200 Seattlites met with the community to fight this proposal. Many of us left the meeting with the hope the whole thing will be canceled, and soon. But even if GoApe packs up and leaves today, the threat of another Ape remains.

(Or maybe a Goape or an Aype would be more fitting as a symbol…I envision a giant troll-like creature.)

I noted in last nights’ meeting that most of the protestors were over thirty years old. The Parks Department said that they were looking to provide “new modes of recreation” that young people are demanding these days. Apparently this translates as high-impact, high-adrenaline, and high-cost modes of eco-tainment—the kind people demand who never learned to love just plain old rocks and sticks and streams and trees.

So, the disturbing question is: when boomers leave the planet, and if the newer generations never learn to find deep solace, wonder, and joy in nature, who will keep out the Goapes and Aypes of the future? What will happen to nature then?

 

Moving Forward to Nature

Safety

No one today would dare tell you that urban parks offer guaranteed safety. But they are surely as safe or safer than anywhere else in the city, including parking lots, schools, malls, and most especially, anywhere inside a moving vehicle. At some point, we are going to have to get realistic about safety.

 

Making Nature Fun Again

We have to stop sending so many depressing You Must Save Planet Earth messages to children. When I first thought about ideas for my novel The Hollow Cedar, I decided to keep the environmental message very subtle and in the background. Mostly, I just wanted kids to be able to read a fun story that takes place in nature — to transport them into an entirely new and fascinating place. My characters go deep into nature, are faced with threats and dangers and challenges, learn about working together to solve problems, and find out they are a lot stronger and smarter than they realized. It’s not a substitute for actual nature-experiences, but it may awaken a curious little mind or two.

 

When I researched my novel, I found that Suz Lipman hosts The Children in Nature Network and learned that there is a growing movement all over the world to get kids back into nature. Find out more here:

Children & Nature Network

Richard Louv

 

Old growth forests…from seedlings to giants

Have you ever looked at one of those massive, towering Douglas firs or western red cedars—the kind with roots that grip the forest floor like giant toes and crowns that disappear high in the sky—and wondered to yourself…what stories could this tree tell?

A forest sketch I did while pondering my novel “The Hollow Cedar

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vulnerable new life

Every tree has its own story to tell. A new seedling faces a thousand dangers every day in the wild, unpredictable forest.

A Douglas fir seedling and beetle I painted for a signage project at Federation Forest.

 

The few who make it

The true forest giants—the ones that live for hundreds of years—have something to tell us about success in life…about being a survivor, and about beauty and strength in old age.

Six hundred years later, the seedling and its neighbors tower over a bull elk.

 

It all fits together

Life in a mature forest seems to go on forever, with layer upon layer of living beings—from the teeming soil to the bustling canopy. Some life-forms are tiny, ephemeral, nearly invisible. Others seem impossibly big. It’s a study in contrasts.

A section of an illustration for the Federation Forest project.

 

Where do we fit in?

I may be biased, but the forests of the Pacific Northwest are the most beautiful, fascinating places on earth. In any season, they are enjoyable—but when I’m in an old-growth forest on a bright summer day, I want to grow roots, sink them deep into the forest floor, and stay there forever.

A snippet of a working sketch for “The Hollow Cedar“.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What about you? Do you have a favorite place? Leave a comment and tell us. And, if you enjoy the blog posts…please consider being a subscriber. The subscriber box is located on the sidebar of the main blog page. Thanks!