Climate Sadness: The Fragile Beauty of Tonlé Sap

Between Research Thinking and Feeling the Enormity

The name Tonlé Sap means “great river” or “fresh water lake” in Khmer, the language of most of Cambodia. It is the large river-lake near the geographic center of Cambodia. Any map or description of Cambodia or the South East Asian region gives prominence of place to Tonlé Sap. Visiting Tonlé Sap after an academic conference in Phnom Penh about climate change and social-economic development seemed to require a different kind of response than scientific or tourist appreciation—at a more visceral and human level.

The poem presented here is written as a response to that visit, grappling with Tonlé Sap’s interlinked localness and something much bigger and much less tangible, but that could nevertheless be felt in the changes taking place. The poem attempts to express something other than the appropriate academic rationality that examines the physical dimensions of Tonlé Sap’s water system hydrology, or the sociocultural and geographic data of the dozen or so nations in the region striving for economic development (Du Bray et al., 2019; Milne & Mahanty, 2015).

This is an outsider learning about a new country and region, but sensing a universal, existential, message for humankind that is implicit in this dense and rich microcosm of people, history, and nature. A more global sensibility is focused here in the particulars of place, the lack of knowledge and resources, the inflows and outflows of water and people, and the seasonal pulse of the life-giving water. Humans have lived in South East Asia for many thousands of years around Tonlé Sap. They have adapted to the weather, the mountains, the flood plains, the wet seasons, and the flooding. They have watched the millions of bats flow out of the outcropping caves eating the insects on the rice fields that stretch into the distance (Sophady, 2014). They have lived in and with the flow of water from mountain to sea, and lived too with the ebbs and flows of the politics of civilizations from eastern and western Asia.

Successive cultures of people have made irrigations systems, harvested fish, and created marvelous castle-like temples and regal edifices at the northern end of Tonlé Sap at Angkor Wat, where the vast rice paddies laced by narrow tracks yield to the elevated landscapes rising into the mountains. Anthropogenic sea level rise challenges all of this history, unnecessarily. The traces of humanity on this landscape are rendered moot by the global actions of humans. Not the same humans, of course, but these human will be gone, literally liquated as their shallow and fertile plain is absorbed in the rising seas. Their lives, their history, and their land squandered to the profit of the few who ultimately destroy humanity’s ability to live on, and with, the land. Present-day signs of activity, population, and husbandry are giving way to the forests being cleared for the benefit of the few and the loss of all (Evans, 2005). Such avarice comes not merely from the local elites but from western culture, and worldwide.

Aldo Leopold (2020) would recognize the absence of a land ethic. Even translating his phrase into “a water ethic” would be making the same point, that we are part of nature, not something separate and over it (Neimanis et al., 2015). We need nature more than nature needs us humans. The poem is a reflection of sadness for Tonlé Sap, for Cambodia, and implicitly concern for all of us everywhere on this planet (Chapman et al., 2017). Some of us read Leopold because he is a conservation icon, for his eloquence, for his affinity for the beauty of nature and creatures; yet, the dominant human forces have continued to ignore his message in the three quarters of a century since he wrote. But Leopold offers much more. He has a wry sadness reflecting on his own younger actions and the sense of modern culture rushing to heedless ruination his bountiful continent’s plentitude in its animals, its birds, its rivers, and soil. Modern spreading-out humans have treated new landscapes as Odysseus once treated his young women servants, as Leopold observes in his opening paragraph: as property to be used and disposed of as such. We may be shocked today at Odysseus treating humans in this way, but we have lost our species reverence for the land without which we are nothing as a human species. At the very least, we protest insufficiently at the destruction and degradation of our natural systems.

Tonlé Sap is situated in a shallow depression on the flood plain of the lower Mekong River that has by that point flowed nearly 4,500 km from southern China down through the countries of Southeast Asia to its delta. The Mekong flood plain covers much of Cambodia and the southern part of Vietnam in a complex hydrological system that is home to nearly 700 million people across South East Asia. Writing this poem celebrates and respectfully acknowledges the salience of nature as the pivotal feature of this prodigious but fragile environment. I write from my own small country New Zealand in the temperate southern Pacific Ocean, applying an antipodean perspective (Pocock, 2005). New Zealand, too, is significantly framed by its own national ecological fragility and distance, but with fewer people, and a growing bicultural appreciation of Māori perspectives on land, water, and nature seen in examples such as Stewart’s (2020) “Mātauranga Māori: A Philosophy From Aotearoa” or Orbell’s (1998) summary of Indigenous origin stories.

I wrote this poem over several weeks after returning from a 2016 conference in Phnom Penh. After our academic event, traveling to the north part of Cambodia followed a circuit to the west of Tonlé Sap and then circling back southward around the top of Tonlé Sap on the eastern side to the capital city again. The poem is a personal tribute of respect and admiration to the spirit of the country and the wide and ancient traditions and history that Cambodia reflects in this part of the world. The poem is a desire to express something of the pathos that humanity’s trajectory is imposing in this wonderful land beyond what formal academic description can give to the strong feelings to which the presence of Tonlé Sap in this landscape gives rise (Du Bray et al., 2019). Measurements, calculation, spreadsheets, laboratories and tests, forward projections, all only capture so much. The effort in writing poetically is done in tribute to the vulnerability of the lake-river system at the heart of Cambodian ecology, life and culture, and its overall biophysical ecosystem that lies so close to sea level (Keskinen & Sithirith, 2009). In the coming decades, Cambodia and this water “engine” feeding its people and economy face unimaginable climate challenges to its survival, its long and dynamic human history notwithstanding.

Since writing this piece after being profoundly stirred by my visit to Cambodia, I have changed academic roles and countries, returning to my home New Zealand to help communities and landowners work at changing how we treat the environment in producing food. New Zealand in the early part of the Covid-19 era has been relatively fortunate, but global connections seem inevitable. Like the rest of the world, we face the even bigger climate heating challenges for society and communities in changing how we do things for and with the environment (Mocatta & Hawley, 2020). We must accommodate to nature at the very minimum. The hubris of insisting on our human desires in the face of nature’s way of doing things looks more like the legendary story of King Canute (Cnut the Great, 995–1035 CE) with every passing year. There is an irony in popular western belief that King Canute was attempting to hold back the sea. Other accounts, however, tell a different story of what Canute was doing: He was showing his human humility to his courtiers and courtiers, that as a natural person he could not command the water (Kerr & Wright, 2015).

With every passing year and every new climate report, humanity’s denialism of the inexorable priority of nature over human assertion of will becomes more apparent. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC Report 6, 2021) has seen headlines reactions for its use of the word “unequivocal” in describing human contributions to the various components of climate change. Report 6 drew on more than 14,000 peer-reviewed studies. But the quieter narrative that is of greater seriousness is the momentum that such adverse change has now gathered, and the inexorable quality that brushes away easy fixes. Later, changing politics or changing corporate attitudes will soon have little ability to solve irrevocable processes; it will take centuries to even begin to slow them and the new vulnerabilities will lead to huge loss of life and disruption (Lyon, Saupe, et al., 2021).

What Is Tonlé Sap?

Tonlé Sap is a large shallow inland freshwater lake that varies in the area it covers through the seasons of the year. It grows from about 2,500 km² in the dry season to about 18,000 after the September rainy season. In this cycle, the estimated volume of water varies from around a million cubic kilometers to perhaps 80 after the rains. Kummu et al. (2014) explain these complex hydrological sequences of the Tonlé Sap–Mekong flood plain system.

Intriguingly, the lake and the river also called Tonlé Sap join the Mekong River in its lower reaches after the journey of more than 2,000 km from China down through the countries of South East Asia (Keskinen & Varis, 2012). The Mekong plains encompass most of Cambodia and the river’s delta at the Southern end of Vietnam. Tonlé Sap in the center of Cambodia is part of this intricate hydrological ecosystem that has fed villages and civilizations for thousands of years, hence calling it the “beating heart” in the poem (Keskinen & Sithirith, 2009). More than the provision of alluvial fertility is the curious pulsing of the Tonlé Sap river system: For half of the year, the water flows northwest, into Tonlé Sap from the Mekong River, and for the other part of the year, it reverses flow and the water runs outward southeast to the Mekong delta over the border (Hung et al., 2012).

Keskinen and Sithirith (2009) summarize contemporary interest in water plans and development as follows:

The Tonlé Sap is due to its unique flood pulse system and immense aquatic production most likely the single most vulnerable area to the negative impacts of major water development plans in the Mekong Basin. Due to its remarkable fish production, the importance of the Tonlé Sap extends far beyond its own basin and beyond the borders of Cambodia, making the Tonlé Sap very much a regional issue. At the same time the Tonlé Sap basin itself is seeing increasing plans for development, particularly in terms of irrigation and agricultural development. These changes are, together with the existing challenges with fisheries management, likely to have an impact to the lake’s aquatic production as well. (p. 1)

In our modern way thinking in terms of nation-states and the map of South East Asia, the national names of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Indonesia are often what springs to mind. Yet, the deep historical culture of this area, containing about 700 million people (almost one tenth of the world’s population), is best understood in the confluence of East Asian civilizational influences and civilizational influences from the Indian subcontinental regions. It is here the intersections and intermingling of those rich cultural traditions in art, language, learning, building, agriculture, and religion can be seen.

Angkor Wat at the top end of Tonlé Sap is the literal embodiment of that long and complex history. The Khmer Kingdom from the 9th to 15th century CE, for example, corresponds in general terms to the European Middle Ages, the height of the Muslim expansion, the Shogun era in Japan, and the Ming dynasty period in China. Angkor Wat has sophisticated irrigation systems that used the ebb and flow of Tonlé Sap as its civilizational basis. From much further back in time, giant stone buildings, with mysterious writing on lintels, are today enveloped in vines, to western readers appearing to reference ancient worlds like Tolkein’s (2005) Lord of the Rings or other magical worlds such as Stephen Donaldson’s (1977–2013) Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

My need to try and express the overall sense of impending loss, portentous rather than immediate, feelings of pathos, and the foreboding distress encapsulated in Yeats’s (2005) last line phrase “slouching toward Jerusalem” grew from the mixture of experiences sketched here. The intense conference discussions often centered on Tonlé Sap or referencing its importance locally and regionally. Then visiting small communities and talking with families going about their daily activities, generously offering their hospitality. Traveling in an arc around and beyond Tonlé Sap to the northern border and ancient ruins and then back to the capital. The fragility of the human world visibly set amid the richness of culture and bounty of nature. Then departure back to the dry landscape of Australia at that time, well above sea level, no matter what amount of anthropogenic rise occurred—the diametric opposite of what is facing the Cambodian people around Tonlé Sap.

A Layered Story

As a limited commentary, I have appended a series of footnotes at points throughout the poem to link or explain references to places or ideas and values that I have attempted to capture in the 11 four-line stanzas. The point of the humanities goes beyond simple reportage of the facts, something I have come to appreciate much more deeply in more recent environmental sociology work (Emmett & Nye, 2017). How do we communicate, tell the story, and raise the questions around getting people to see the need to change our collective treatment of the environment, our place in nature? (Castree, 2014). What will lead people beyond “carrots and sticks” to see the imperative for their own well-being and that of the planet? Reading factsheets like the United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC, 2017) reveal impacts of rising sea levels long before details and specific actions are fully understood and motivating globally. Behind the questions of what sea level rise will do to disrupt current economies, polities, and international relations lie the existential opportunity to live at peace and respect with and within nature (Naess, 1995).

These questions and our collective tardiness to act currently sit in visceral tension with our continuing to undermine our human place on the planet. The poignancy of Cambodia’s Tonlé Sap situation says all this so mutely and to me so powerfully. I am reminded of my home country New Zealand, where Māori origin accounts describe the procreative agency between sky father Ranginui and Papatūānuku earth mother. In many cultures—Māori included—water has a primary creative agency, te mana o te wai meaning the dignity and standing of water, that is to be respected. For the developing articulation of this Mäori worldview, te ao Māori, scholars such as Stewart (2020) open up this alternative Indigenous framing to Western science and economic assumptions, or from the traditional anthropological perspective, Orbell (1998) provides a summary.

The Poem

Tonlé Sap

Oh Tonlé Sap! Mother of the nation, father of the thirsty earth; ¹ hidden in the bosom of Asia’s apron, lying prone. ² Before the rivers streaming south by season, nature’s reason for the wondrous culture and people that it feeds. ³

Oh Tonlé Sap! Beating heart of Cambodia, pulsing year by year, bring life and energy to its many people and hamlets. ⁴ Renewed by ocean and mountains, its sacred shallows ignored, little known. So local yet so deep in meaning and importance.

Verstehen! say the sociologists; ⁵ Gaia! say the deep ecologists; ⁶ Money say the loggers—their voices louder, today’s NPV ⁷ more important than children of the people, centuries hence; ⁸ What voice for Tonlé Sap then? Who listens to her whispers?

Defenseless, naked not in allurement, but lacking robes of forest, farms and renewing care of land and village, the pulse of rise and fall tenuously balancing life and prosperity high and low. ⁹ Where have you gone Asian Ophelia? Whither, so wan? ¹⁰

The diamond on the map of Cambodia, tied each end with the bows of Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. ¹¹ On the silken pillow of the kingdom, people’s respect for authority and order lays down. ¹² The silvered sheet of Tonlé Sap reflects the spirit of its place. ¹³

But do we care? Do we understand? Do we realize how delicate is the balance the divine order allows us in this jewel? ¹⁴ Maybe no; well, maybe yes, in some primal way. But what is happening to mega-gallons of life that Tonlé Sap is and brings?

Like floating villages, like flecks in the eye, our inattention floats this way, then that. Call the geographers. Hear their stentorian voices. Well, no; how do we come to know, or heed future urgency now! But people know; we need their wisdom.

Sure we can measure—we should. All metrics are important. ¹⁵ Science need not contradict spirituality. ¹⁶ The beating Khmer heart needs both for Tonlé Sap’s wellbeing—yes, our health. Otherwise erosion, fertility, food loss, pesticide residues burn. ¹⁷

Nature is not easily offended, but nature is not impressed by humans, either. ¹⁸ Nature may hurt for many centuries, and then she shrugs her shoulders, she does what she does, humans are flicked aside. ¹⁹ Respect, my friends, nature’s idea of balance.

Don’t you understand that Nature’s daughter, Tonlé Sap, speaks with her mother? This is older than ancient wisdom. Mother Nature sings, too, crooning to her silvered offspring, cradling her in care and concern and fellow feelings of love. ²⁰

Feel their joy, their care, but feel their pain too, denudation, disrespect, disinterest. ²¹ Yet in the end it is only us we hurt. Nature renews; the joined life of the earth finds other ways. What about if we fail the test—Nature, not nation, is the capital “N.” ²²

What do poets say to their love: How shall I describe thee? ²³ With feelings? With knowledge? Your gentle touch, the graze of your garment? Water? It is all these things and more, but still not said, ²⁴ this need for response from receding affection—trust. ²⁵

Will the pulsing heart continue? Will those trillions, myriad, grains of rice you nurture flow as white gold forever? ²⁶ Will elephants and concrete roads carry them away, and feed us? Will the fish always renew life in Tonlé Sap, Surely? How else? ²⁷

Sociology and the social sciences straddle the disciplinary divide that grew through the 20th century, expressed in C. P. Snow’s famous phrase “two cultures.” But this split between the constancy of human sociability and needs, over against the amazing capacities of science, seems to be working toward a denouement in Tonlé Sap as a microcosm of the planet. On one side, scientific, military, and corporate confidence of post–World War II western mid-20th-century achievement continues today: technocratic, measuring and modifying the physical world intending the better comfort of humans. But on the other side, the human disciplines and arts continue to ask the big questions in both local and more universal forms about human existence, well-being, and purpose.

Development, extraction, and exploitation of natural resources happen in both local ways that can be known even if not resisted, such as deforestation around Tonlé Sap. More ominous is the breadth of such processes at the planetary scale. Ironically, these larger processes are almost hidden from understanding although there is no hidden cloud—since they are happening literally all around us and in front of us—like imperceptible damage from a slow acid that cannot be stopped. The global greenhouse gas envelope has a momentum, like a train that does not seem fast to human perception, but such unawareness is belied by the train’s mass that at some point becomes unstoppable (Lyon, Saupe, et al., 2021)

Estimating the effects of past, current, and potential future emissions to only 2100 is therefore short-sighted. Critical problems for food production and climate-forced human migration are projected to arise well before 2100, raising questions regarding the habitability of some regions of the Earth after the turn of the century. (p. 1)

Our contemporary regional, national, and international governance arrangements—before we come to any aesthetic sensibility—are thus at present still selling us short of the seriousness of our planetary circumstances. At the point of change to the next century, it will matter very little what humans try to do (Lyon, Dunhill, et al, 2021; Lyon, Saupe, et al., 2021). That framing of climate change momentum in the 1980s had seemed a “suitably distant horizon,” that is, well more than a century into the future “. . .by 2010,” but it is, we now know, far too superficial and short-term perspective. Like “net zero by 2050,” it is only an early step in the change that has to happen. Climate heating will drive much further with much stronger impacts beyond that imagined endpoint over many subsequent centuries.

The contributions and intersections of interdisciplinary interest can be overwhelmed by a corporate academic world pushing for more research, greater relevance to currently defined problems, more quantifying of information, and “cutting edge” and “innovative” studies. Often, solutions are premised on technological magic and an insufficiently long-term vision or deep response. There can indeed be pleasure, cleverness, and usefulness in current scientific work. But at times the larger sense of the overall aims and best interests of humanity need to return to humanity’s position within nature, within the natural order. Humanity divided off from nature—separate from it, above it, over against it, not believing itself reliant upon nature—makes the very idea of anthropogenic change seems unthinkable. Who, us? Little us? Humans doing this, really. . .? Something almost inexpressible is demanded of us to reconnect to an ancient maturity, wisdom, and humility in our connection and place within nature.

Postscript to the Poem

In the original draft of this poem, I concluded with the following stanza as I attempted to draw back into my social academic world the profound impact Tonlé Sap had made on me. Today’s world of Covid-19 travel restrictions is an eloquent reminder to me of the power of being present. That trip’s physical “being there” meant first traveling northward from Phnom Penh on the western Thai side of the country. Then above Tonlé Sap at Siem Reap in the north looking over the border into Thailand from the high hills, Laos to the Northeast, Vietnam to the east out of sight, far above the “sea” of seemingly endless Cambodian rice plains. Then coming back from the overgrown building and temples with runic writings of mysterious ancient civilizations in the north, down the eastern side of Tonlé Sap. The mundanity of the landscape and communities, the dignity of the people, the hardness and simplicity of the living were all impressive on their own terms. Seeing through the touristic veneer came in both observing little habits like traditional rice pounding for a breakfast meal, or in the literal circumnavigation of Tonlé Sap, the profundity of the lake’s position in that landscape and lived environment, deeply impacting my western ease and generic view of environment.

But the lines of that proposed last stanza seemed too conventional, even if they aimed at bringing back the contemplation of Tonlé Sap to western conversations about human-made climate change. One of the most obvious consequences is the now scientifically well-documented sea level rise that will force communities and cities on coastal edges all round the world, rich and poor, to shift:

Bohr and Berra said the future is especially hard to predict! Don’t the simple consequences of our present actions predict the future? Not so hard then, but dare we think so simply? Einstein said repeating actions, expecting different results, is foolishness. ²⁸

Einstein’s saying, or something similar, is attributed to multiple sources in popular culture. In the end, the summative or inferential intention of the stanza seemed superfluous to the purpose of the poem, more like a commentary note than the final cadences of the specialness of Tonlé Sap. Celebrating that unique habitat and the rich cultural and natural ecology that has existed for millennia seemed the better point to make. Tonlé Sap has a local and unique significance in light of what the anthropogenic world is bringing in terms of losses and future forgone.

Beyond the symmetries and sympathies of constructing poetic stanzas, a personal process of deepening understanding has developed for me, part emotive and relational, but at the same time cognitive and informational. The effort to capture some poetic syntheses or recognition is not oppositional to thinking about the environment or considering what the science is saying. The effort of writing in this way has benefits for comparison and insight that can be applied in many ways: deeper understanding of consequences of climate change, that slowness does not mean unimportance, helping meet the need to find ways to connect with people at different registers that make sense to them.

Even learning how another person’s oppositional view to one’s own could be brought to see the potential disruption previously ignored or discounted opens new possibilities. Effort with purpose might be called reflexivity (Gu-Ze’ev et al., 2001) while Bourdieu’s (2000) term “socioanalysis” aimed to combine individual and personal apprehension beyond the formal-rational domains, but he combined this with intent to understand the wider social world at the same time, and as part of, the more inward reassessment and “felt motivations” (Pop, 2011, p. 309).

It is interesting that both Leopold’s mature work in his evocative collection of essays, cited earlier, and Bourdieu’s (2007) reflections here were offered in the form of “sketches.” Their very different intellectual journeys notwithstanding, in their maturity each arrived at a provisionality even as they articulated in their writing the lucidity of the scientific research they had built over decades of work, expressing it in these sketches with poetic power in the face of natural and human inequalities across the 20th century. This includes in the present context the bringing together of the many parts of the complexity of human–environment interaction and engagement in both destructive and elevating ways.

Leopold was a practitioner of the environment, of nature, but even so, his understanding of a global conservation imperative only emerged over time. Seeing the “dying green fire” in the eyes of the mother wolf that he and his colleagues had killed as young men in south western United States (Leopold, 2020, p. 124) fundamentally shifted his understanding as he continued to learn many more things about water, species, the environment, forestry, and land management practices. Bourdieu’s intellectual project starts at the other end of the human end of the environment–society bridge. He eschews easy claims of individual agency, the sufficiency of personalizing action that is better understood as more broadly socially determined. He is not a theorist of the environment, but many scholars have seen in his insights better ways to understand humankind’s relation to nature, proposing more humility, less hubris. One or two examples help see things that support a reorientation of humanity’s overreach via our collective modern technologies and scale of human species population, and the still-continuing rates of extraction and exploitation. What might be ignored at local or regional scales can longer be ignored at planetary scale when there are no more continents to go onto next.

Hughes (2015) sets out a Bourdieusian perspective on the symbolic power of the IPCC reports, as something separate from factual scientific content, even before the more recent IPCC Report 6 (2021) that cements the value of such analysis. Caine’s desire to bring Bourdieu’s framework can be seen in

Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical explication of social practice [a]s a mode of practical engagement with the world. It is a way of seeing the world with potential for reproduction and transformation by considering the relationship between an individual’s interests and that of the actions of others within structured social contexts. Practice theory helps explain the struggle for power through the subtleties of meaning, the strategic use of resources, and the influence of history. (Caine, 2013, p. 335)

Like the IPCC debates, this is not simply a matter of facts, but modern fossil fuel practices. More than ever, what Leopold came to recognize can also be drawn from Bourdieu’s (2000) lexicon in the contrasting concept of misrecognition (Pascalian Meditations), not merely about social class distinctions, and extending Bourdieu’s (1999) Weight of the World. Misrecognition is exerted through a mixture of ignoring and intentionality, in effect choosing to not know, to not see, the present climate peril and allowing the multiple threats to humankind’s existence to continue to grow.

The climatic and environmental danger we face are, for Bourdieu, misrecognized as “an everyday and dynamic process where one thing [here, nature and the planetary environment] is not recognized for what it is because it was not previously ‘cognized’ within the range of dispositions and propensities of the habitus of the person(s) confronting it” (James, 2015, p. 100). It is not simply factual scientific information that influences change, nor is it change in currently intransigent politicians, corporates, or consumer complacency. A new aesthetic, a global discourse that “sees” and feels the imminent danger, and recognizes it for what it really is, is needed. Feeling the sadness exemplified in Tonlé Sap, the irony of such physical abundance that will be so pointlessly eclipsed in the centuries ahead, may be the most powerful force for change in the end.

Conclusion

Is nature truth? It is what it is, and what we as humans think of as knowledge is of course merely our species knowledge, our perception, and only our perspective. We are barely yet learning that a modern epistemology that rejects or fades into insignificance the grounds of how we know and how to relate to our physical environment is destined to overreach. Certainly, technology that humans have created will help address dilemmas in our relationship with nature, but the question of finding an appropriate place and balance in the hierarchy of nature is a much larger and more complex matter. Yes, measurement helps, but at other times scholarship is pulled back to the opposite realization that when something is quantified this may have missed the point. In such moments, a poetic sensibility, maybe an aesthetic gestalt, is called for. One that acknowledges the holistic—perhaps mystical, but certainly mysterious—nature of the world is bigger than our human understanding and science. While we need the tools of understanding and science, we need to appreciate the purpose they serve.

In a personal journey of academic inquiry, a poetic effort to understand is a different way to approach the largest problem of our era, of human existence. Focusing on human responses to nature is a matter of thinking and feeling our way to what we have done and are doing to nature. Even before C. P. Snow (1963), the pseudo-divide between the quantitative and the poetic perspectives has been inappropriately exacerbated by the modernizing assertiveness of the 20th century (Blackbourn, 2011; Lines & Lines, 1991). Calculating one by one—the numbers—we still have to reach an existential place—via the humanities—about what the numbers mean and our response to them, poetically, visually, or in some other way. Every effort then contributes an increment in relating at least one’s own scholarly enterprise to the modesty of our relation to the natural order.