Befouling the Final Frontier

a new essay & behind-the-scenes

A couple of months ago I got the kind of email a writer dreams about: hi, wanna write an essay for the new york times magazine? Only problem was I’d already extremely overpacked my fall semester with work (also relevant if you were wondering about some of the reasons this newsletter’s been dormant). But that’s not a thing you say no to, especially when it’s an essay about human activity in space and what it means. So I made my life hell for a month and a half, and the result is this essay, which I’m extremely proud of.

You can read it online today, in print next weekend. It was a whirwind writing and revising process, with two total overhauls, evolving from a three-thousand-plus word argument about seeing space as wilderness to under two thousand words, “wilderness” being none of them. Two texts I saw as central to the project aren’t mentioned now at all: William Cronon’s “The Trouble With Wilderness,” which I’ve loved for a decade; and Holmes Rolston III’s “The Preservation of Natural Value in the Solar System” (link is to a pdf), new to me from research for this piece, a stunning and powerful articulation of, it turns out, my deepest personal values! The name is dry but the prose is heart-stopping. For example:

Banish soon and forever the bias that only habitable places are good ones (temperature 0-30 degrees C., with soil, water, breathable air), and all uninhabitable places empty wastes, piles of dull stones, dreary, desolate swirls of gases. To ask what these worlds are good for prevents asking whether these worlds are good in deeper senses.

So Cronon and Rolston didn’t make it in, though they’re humming under the surface. But since this started out as a piece about space-as-wilderness, space-as-nature, some echoes of some other favorite nature writing snuck in.

I was aware of one as I was writing, an echo of Jenny Price’s “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA,” in how I framed this section:

McDowell sees a few ways to frame the story thus far of humanity in space. One way is through the shifts around whose satellites dominated orbit … Another way to see the story is in the shifting demographics of objects in space. …

Here’s Price:

The saga of the concrete L.A. River plays out as every brand of nature story. First, a “what nature means” tale: Angelenos reimagined the river as nonexistent, and banished it from their collective imagination of history and place. Also, a tale of wild things. …

I knew that as I was writing. But I didn’t realize for a long time where the cadence of the opening lines came from. They just felt right as I wrote them. I could sort of tell I was writing to a familiar melody, but I wasn’t sure if it was one I wrote myself:

Cassini was crashed into Saturn, Opportunity sits covered in dust. The shuttles were dispersed to museums, and Kepler was shut down to remain in its Earth-trailing orbit, hunting exoplanets no more.

But no, it’s a few lines of John McPhee, the cadence of which has been stuck in my head for years:

The poles of the earth have wandered. The equator has apparently moved. The continents, perched on their plates, are thought to have been carried so very far and to be going in so many directions…

No one would know that if I didn’t tell them, but I like that it’s all there.