Long Island
Article
Long Island is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between April 30, 2021 and December 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Vogt’s life begins in turn-of-the-19th-century Long Island, New York”; “of the Jones Beach State Bird Sanctuary in Long Island”; “tromping through pre-suburbanized Long Island”. It most often appears alongside New York, ACX, AI.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: April 30, 2021
- Last seen: December 04, 2024
Appears In
- Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
- Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
- My Left Kidney
- Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
Related Pages
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- New York (3 shared issues)
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- ACX (2 shared issues)
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- AI (2 shared issues)
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- Berlin (2 shared issues)
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- California (2 shared issues)
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- EA (2 shared issues)
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- Europe (2 shared issues)
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- France (2 shared issues)
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- Germany (2 shared issues)
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- India (2 shared issues)
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- Mexico (2 shared issues)
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- Seattle (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Vogt’s life begins in turn-of-the-19th-century Long Island, New York. At fourteen, he contracts polio, which leaves him with a Richard III-esque limp and drives him from his preferred leisure activity, hiking, to the gentlemanly sport of bird-watching. It is this hobby that brings him into contact with the nascent environmental movement of the 1930s, and soon he is doing unpaid field work, editing, and writing for various ecological societies on the East Coast. He becomes director of the Jones Beach State Bird Sanctuary in Long Island, where he notices the sudden dwindling in local bird populations and launches a polemical campaign against what he believes to be the culprit: government-sponsored public works projects to drain ditches and marshes and spray pesticides to control the mosquito population, intended to curb the spread of malaria. Vogt refers to these efforts as "‘perilously close to destructive government-sponsored rackets’" and uses his position as editor of the Audubon Society’s official publication, Bird-Lore, to lambast them with such venom that the president of the Audubon Society tells him to stop and, eventually, fires him. (Incidentally, the particular bird species Vogt was seeing decline and was so worried about, the dovekie, is currently listed as "least concern" on the conservation status scale, so I guess all that ditch-dredging and pesticide-spraying didn’t have much of a long-term impact. In his defense, though, dovekies are ridiculously cute.)
Inline links: dovekie, ridiculously cute
The problem with the concept of carrying capacity – impossible to define or know when we’ve surpassed, until after the proverbial moment when killing one mosquito or dovekie too many plunges us into everlasting fire and brimstone – is that it seems mostly like a mood affiliation thing. Consider this: when you look out at the bird feeder hanging in your backyard (Bay Area people living in closets, use your imagination here), do you see a blissful symbiotic coexistence of the human world and nature, with humans generously giving of our growth-accumulated abundance to help the birds flourish? Or do you see a dystopian struggle where innocent creatures pushed to the brink of death by our traffic and pesticides and housecats must rely on meager scraps for survival? There isn’t really a right view here, I don’t think, just a predilection for seeing what matches your intuition and telling a story about it. Given the life story Mann depicts for Vogt, it’s not hard to see why he would lean toward the pessimistic take. From the childhood marred by a philandering father who left his family in a cloud of scandal and ruin, to the adult life spent stumbling from one bourgeois non-occupation (theater critic, bird watcher, government mole rooting out Nazis in South America) to the next, to the childlessness and divorce, Vogt seems happiest when he is away from any humans, whether tromping through pre-suburbanized Long Island, or alone with the guano-producing birds on the desolate coast of Peru. Were he to live in an age of Facebook and Twitter, he would definitely be that guy reposting memes that COVID is finally letting our planet "heal."
Inline links: mood affiliation
MASSAPEQUA (LONG ISLAND), NEW YORK, USA Contact: Gabe Contact Info: gabeaweil[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 29th, 08:30 PM Location: 47 Clinton Pl., Masspequa NY 11758 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G8MG4F+3XR Notes: Please RSVP via e-mail if you plan to attend.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87G8MG4F+3XR
My cousin Harvey and his wife Pam, who let me stay at their house on Long Island while I recovered, and their son Will, for visiting me in the hospital.
Every new $900,000 summer house in the north woods of Michigan or on the shore of Long Island has so many pipe railings, ramps, hob-tread metal spiral stairways, sheets of industrial plate glass, banks of tungsten-halogen lamps, and white-cylindrical shapes, it looks like an insecticide refinery. I once saw the owners of such a place driven to the edge of sensory deprivation by the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all. They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out [...]