The natural world, the environment, and the future of the planet were a main theme of multiple author talks at this year’ s Portland Book Festival, which took place Saturday along the South Park Blocks.
Hans, a Eurasian eagle-owl, stole the show in the morning’s first presentation in the Winningstad Theatre, “Atlas Obscura: Wild Life.” Hans was introduced to the audience by Sidney Campbell, a bird handler and trainer with Cascades Raptor Center. The Eugene-based nonprofit treats between 400 and 700 birds a year at Oregon’s only raptor-specific wildlife hospital, as well as providing public education about raptor species (which include owls, falcons, eagles, and hawks).
Hans joined Campbell onstage by flying from the arm of another bird handler standing in the theater’s side gallery. As Campbell spoke to the audience, she kept Hans distracted by feeding him “rat snacks, quail snacks, and chicken snacks” from her pocket.
“He’s never been in a situation quite like this,” she said. She told the audience that the Eurasian eagle-owl is one of the world’s largest owl species. As she spoke, Hans’ head rotated from left to right, his alert, amber eyes alternating between focusing on the audience and the snacks in Campbell’s hand.
Saying that his eyes are approximately one inch in diameter, Campbell explained why owls’ heads rotate as much as they do: A bone in their skulls keeps an owls’ eyes immobile, necessitating their ability to rotate their heads nearly 270 degrees.
Shortly afterward, Hans flew back to his other handler, who took him offstage.
Hans appeared in the panel along with science journalist Cara Giaimo and artist, author, and naturalist Julie Beeler. The panel was moderated by essayist Elena Passarello.
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Before Hans’ appearance, Giaimo, in talking about her book Atlas Obscura: Wild Life, gave a delightful romp through fascinating facts about the natural world: that Antarctica is the world’s largest desert (because it doesn’t rain); that, if stretched out, the Pacific lamprey’s single muscle would wrap around one side of the Winningstad Theatre (a stat that led to gasps among audience members), and that the chemical composition of sphagnum moss is such that it is a natural preservative. Archaeologists, Giaimo told the audience, have found numerous objects — “bodies, butter, wagon wheels” preserved in it.
Author, naturalist, and artist Julie Beeler spoke after Giaimo. The author of The Mushroom Color Atlas, a naturalist and artist, Beeler’s love and enthusiasm for the fungal world was infectious.
Mushrooms and other fungi have numerous uses: curing snow blindness, healing insect wounds, and as fabric dyes — one way Beeler uses mushrooms in the art and textiles she creates.
Speaking of how she extracts dyes, she said, “If you think about making yourself a cup of tea, that’s exactly what I’m doing, except I’m using fungi.”
One of the last-minute fact checks for Atlas Obscura: Wild Life, Giaimo said, concerned the fungus known as the “humongous fungus.” Located in the Malheur Wildlife Refuge and measuring 3.7 miles in size, it is commonly thought to be the largest individual organism on Earth.
Not so, Giaimo said — a seagrass colony off the Australian coast is the largest. “I’m so sorry to everyone here,” she said, as the audience sighed, booed, and laughed.
Later in the day, in the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Powers appeared in conversation with Literary Arts’ executive director Andrew Proctor, discussing his newest novel, Playground.
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The novel is set between the 1960s and 1980s, and the ocean — really, all water bodies — play a defining, life-changing role in the lives of multiple characters, including Evie Beaulieu, who discovers her love of the sea when her engineer father puts her in a Cousteau-Gagnan aqualung, an early version of the scuba suit.
“Until the creation of this invention, human beings’ presence in the ocean is really limited,” Powers said. “Suddenly, we can be there for periods of time. This vast part of the world has been opened up for the first time.” Speaking of Evie’s character, he said that “she discovers that under water, this is her true idiom. She can be graceful.”
Later in the conversation, Powers argued there are three types of dramatic tension in literature, writ large: “man against himself,” or the psychological novel; “man against man,” or, the social or political novel. The third is “man against the elements,” or what Powers described as “the possible viable ways of being a human being on this Earth.”
That genre, he argued, “used to be the heart and soul of most literature.” But, over the past couple of hundred years, that type of story “goes drastically out of fashion.”
Why? “As a culture, we started to believe that our technologies made that question irrelevant,” Powers said. “We had won that war — we can live on Earth on our own terms.” But he argued, “We are missing the story. Not that we did win that war, but that we are losing it badly. We desperately need stories to reintroduce this idea of what we think we are doing here and whether or not it’s even possible.”
Speaking of The Overstory, his 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that tells the interlocking stories of nine people and their relationships with the trees in their lives, Powers reflected it was “radical” for the trees to be just as central characters as the book’s humans.
“We want to hang onto a world that we know, that we understand, but we know that it is changing catastrophically, in ways and in magnitudes that go beyond our ability to prepare for, and we all carry around this dread,” he said.
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As he wrote Playground, he wondered, “maybe this question of hope has to be looked at again,” he said. “Part of me has begun to realize that we may be hoping for the wrong things. If we’re hoping for the continuation of life as we now live it, maybe that’s misplaced hope.”
In Giaimo’s mind, we are living in what she called a “Joni Mitchell moment” of “we don’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone,” she said.
“Other species are so talented at living together and keeping the world going,” Giaimo said. “If we can become more like that and less like we are … we don’t have to lose hope yet.”
