What Cheer, Netop?

Poachers turned rangers, complicity in tyranny, the colors of marble, bears > Bigfoot, For All Mankind

Francis Annagu’s “How Former Poachers are Protecting Nigeria’s Vanishing Rainforest” explores the lines of tension, conflict, and resolution in taking a conservation approach to a multiuse ecosystem. Buried deep in the heart of this article is one way—probably the most effective way—to turn hunters into rangers: make the latter a more attractive option, especially in terms of pay. That hasn’t answered every challenge, as agriculture and deforestation continue to press on the forest reserve. But that problem isn’t unique to Nigeria, either. Make sure you scroll far enough to see the forest elephants.

Andrea Pitzer—always worth reading—writes in “Love that is Complicit” that whatever our opinions on immigration in the U.S. (my own is that the government has been kicking the can down the road with regard to just, humane, and consistent policy for most of my lifetime), the current situation requires either looking past an awful lot of cruelty to find acceptable, or very carefully not even knowing that there’s something to look at.

In “These Marbles were Never White,” Danai Christopoulou joins a growing number of Greek commentators on the Anglophone world’s ongoing love affair with Greek mythology, in ways that often obscure that mythology’s vibrancy and cultural context. I’m no exception here, as someone who’s called myself a Hellenic polytheist for almost 15 years, and made my own contribution to the body of stories based on Greek myths and legends. Those were my entry points into a deeper appreciation for both modern and ancient Greek culture and language, but Christopoulou’s piece highlights the cost of receiving these stories stripped of their cultural, historical, and linguistic context—which is the way that those of us in the Anglophone sphere tend to receive them. When I visited Greece in 2008, the museum she describes was still under construction. Some years later I visited the British Museum, where the Elgin marbles are still on display—complete with rather defensively worded signage. Hmm.

Jeff VanderMeer’s “Double Take” is the kind of nature writing I’d love to do. Early in his piece on Bigfoot and bears, he says:

I’m zealous about the fact that we don’t need Bigfoot populating the wilderness to find the natural world mysterious and marvelous. The bears often mistaken for cryptids, for example, already exist and capture our imagination for very good reasons.

This right here is why I became a tracker. VanderMeer goes on to discuss what he’s learned about animals from the trail cameras in his yard—contrasting this with purported Bigfoot images on trail cameras in the woods and how none of them seem to reliably be the real deal. One of his interviewees for the article says that if Bigfoot enthusiasts didn’t have Bigfoot, they’d just get into some other conspiracy theory, not into actual nature. Which I think is true, and also sad.

I recently joked that I watch most movies and TV shows months to years after everyone else has already seen them, which is why I only got to the first season of “For All Mankind” in the last few weeks. It’s out on BluRay, and if you have a player, this really is an excellent way to watch it—the gorgeous visuals are shown off to their best effect. The first season takes place beginning in 1969, and they get the tech and attitudes of the period so right, I’d forget I wasn’t watching a documentary (or maybe Apollo 13) until something obviously ahistorical happened. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the subsequent seasons will get physical disc releases anytime soon, so I may have to pony up for Apple TV if I want more stuff like this.

After a December where it rained so much and so hard that river valleys flooded and levees breached, it’s been weirdly dry in the Pacific Northwest. A near-record streak of rainless days broke a few days ago, but it’s been so warm that the mountains still have way less snow than usual. (That was part of what caused the flooding; instead of snow, all that precipitation fell as rain, which then ran downhill through stream and river courses at flood volumes.) If that doesn’t change, this coming summer is going to suck; mountain snowpack accounts for the region’s water supply, and increasingly dry summers have been making for apocalyptic wildfire seasons. When I moved to western Washington in the mid 90s, smoke season wasn’t a thing. Now it is.

January 2026 simultaneously lasted several months and was gone in a flash. I think the weather has something to do with my distorted perception of time right now; that, and it’s the one thing I’ve noticed lingering for me personally since the first year of COVID. Which is odd, because I spent much of that year running around in the woods, practicing nature connection routines, and in generally living much more by nature’s markers of time than I do now.

Maybe I should go back to that.

The other thing affecting my perception of time are recent events across the country and around the world. I watched the videos of Renée Good being shot more times than was probably good for me, until I realized that more viewings would bring no more clarity. Clarity is a thing lacking from the current administration, which lies like it breathes, reflexively advancing a narrative wherein its every action is justified regardless of the evidence.

I used to think I’d never have to explain why that’s a bad thing, but here we are: even if I were a fan of Donald Trump and all his works (and, to be clear, it’s been obvious to me what sort of person he is since 1989), the immediate promulgation of an unverifiable and in most cases manifestly untrue narrative serves no one—including the current administration, which seems hard pressed to understand why it isn’t more popular. They are creating a situation not only where they cannot be trusted, but where a significant number of people will assume that everything they say is a lie whether or not it actually is. The boy who cried wolf has nothing on this.

Doomscrolling can make a day feel like a year, and there’s no bottom to it.

I did, in the early part of the month, intentionally spend some slow time: reflecting, resting, goal setting. Perhaps that made the month longer, but it was necessary after burning myself out before and during the holidays. My family is going through a hard time that we aren’t really talking about, and dealing with that doesn’t leave much for other hard things. Yet more revelations that the world is run by monsters, for instance.

There was a time, when I was very young, when I thought monsters were fiction.

It’s been a long, dry January, and unlike other parts of the country, we’re still kind of waiting for winter to start here.

Still waiting for the snow, and possibly an avalanche.