Hello Sequins, it's Max.
This weekend I finished watching a gem of a documentary, called Listers. It follows two twenty-something brothers as they became "extreme" birdwatchers. It's got a very home-video feel to it: One brother is almost always behind the camera, they live in their old Kia Sedona minivan for a year, sleeping in Cracker Barrel parking lots and cooking beans on the side of the road. It's hilarious, down-to-earth, and surprisingly deep.
I'm not a big birder myself. I stop to laugh with the squawking green parrots by my apartment, and I've followed the miracles and misfortunes of Big Bear's bald eagle family. But I've never trained my ear or binocs on distinguishing the many species that come and go around me. The two brothers in Listers begin the same way. They set an arbitrary goal to have a so-called big year of logging hundreds of birds in the lower 48 and they learn about the birds and the (frankly wild) human subculture along the way.
That's what Listers did *so* effectively.
It's my job to distill concepts of science and nature into stories that anybody can relate to. And I like to think I take a fairly realistic position on how educational that should be: less educational than what I often produce. Most of the publications I write for and my colleagues in traditional media feel a duty to inform with rigor. Some have explicit missions to educate and supplement standard curricula. That's great and important, and I sincerely love that side of the job. But I can't help also feeling there's a gap in our audience that we only pretend we are addressing. On many occasions, I have written stories believing that, because of my word choice and explanations, suits a “science curious” audience with high school education. That may be technically correct, but I fear that I and others mistake “broadly understandable” for “broad appeal.”
No piece or media will appeal to everyone, much less find them in today's algorithm-beholden minefield. Instead, I would love to see (and work on) projects that shift education from centerpiece to side-effect. Many of us already consider this when we write news and feature stories: We open with a human character and frame the narrative around the beginning, middle, and end in their eyes. Pushing one step further, as so many great writers and documentarians already do, means portraying what it feels like to connect with birds, or rivers, or volcanoes, or whatever to highlight a character’s emotions and how their life has changed — rather than what they learned through their journey. In other words, it replaces the duty to inform an audience with a duty to inspire the audience to inform themselves.
That's what I felt watching Listers. I felt inspired to wade into nature with a pal. I felt inspired to set an arbitrary goal that gets me off my phone and into the real world. I felt inspired to pay more attention to what (and I mean this with the utmost respect and affection) a stoned dirtbag with a mullet thinks is interesting. In this case that's a three-toed woodpecker. In another case, that maybe I or you work in, that inspiration may transport me elsewhere.
We're living in a time when both science and nature are under immense threat from fascist goblins blessed with neither imagination nor compassion. Anything that you, I, we do to inspire each other to connect more with the universe outside our phones and doors should be a top priority.
I drafted this newsletter in a park while leaning back against a large California sycamore. Midway through my walk home, a large bird coasted past me at eye level from one tree to the branch of another. I know enough to say it was a bird of prey. Probably a hawk of some sort. So I searched the internet for what exactly it was, based on its reddish feathers and banded tail. A Cooper’s hawk, I think, though I can’t say for sure. The thing is, it could have been something else, like a red shouldered hawk. And maybe that would be obvious to a real birder. Maybe I still didn’t know enough to distinguish one hawk from another. But now I certainly know enough to care.
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That's about all I've got this week, scroll below for some recommendations, including a new story about birds for Sequencer by one of our mentees.
Thank you as always for reading and supporting, especially to those of you who spare a few bucks every month to help us keep the lights in here. We love and appreciate you.
À la prochaine,
Max
