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WORK TITLE: China Lake
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://barretbaumgart.com/home
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/2017-spring/china-lake.htm
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Attended the University of California, Berkeley; University of Iowa, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and musician. Plays drums in a band called Wreche.
AWARDS:Iowa Prize in Literary Nonfiction, 2016, for China Lake.
WRITINGS
Contributor to publications and websites, including Vice, Literary Review, Seneca Review, Guernica, Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, and Camera Obscura.
SIDELIGHTS
Barret Baumgart is a writer and musician based in Los Angeles, California. He attended the University of California, Berkeley and obtained a master’s degree from the University of Iowa. Baumgart has contributed articles to publications and websites, including Vice, Literary Review, Seneca Review, Guernica, Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, and Camera Obscura.
In 2017, Baumgart released his first book, a nonfiction volume called China Lake: A Journey into the Contradicted Heart of a Global Climate Catastrophe. He describes taking his climate change-denying mother to China Lake, an area in California occupied by the military, which has been devastated by climate change. Baumgart comments on other examples of climate changes and provides more information on his family dynamics.
In an interview with Landon Bates, contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books Blog, Baumgart explained how he came to write about climate change. He stated: “I was at my computer reading about the floods sweeping Colorado in September 2013 when I clicked across this conspiracy site that tried to blame cloud seeding. I thought: ‘What the hell’s cloud seeding?’ So I started reading about the history and this led me to China Lake. China Lake had been on my radar from backpacking in the Sierras and working for the Forest Service.” Baumgart continued: “I’d also written a little about the Coso Range petroglyphs in an essay I submitted to John D’Agata’s workshop in Iowa. There was a paragraph about the irony of Native American rock art being preserved on a government weapons test facility, which made it into the book. … Most people read that and were unimpressed. … They said: ‘Go further.’ But there was a seed there.” Baumgart also told Bates: “I called it a ‘journey’ in the subtitle, because that’s what it is. It’s not a book exclusively about climate change—climate, and more specifically the China Lake base, serves as a prism that unlocks all these tangled and previously hidden threads. It’s a journey into all these contradictions and into despair and yet hopefully for the reader it’s also a positive immersive experience.” In the same interview with Bates, Baumgart remarked: “The drama is in the information, in the factual reveals and reversals—in setting up readers’ expectations, then undercutting or re-tuning them. I feel at times it’s a movement akin to long poetry. While the book is obviously not a poem, it kind of has the logic of one. There’s a poetic logic running throughout the book that ties the disparate threads, all the imagery, the research, and memoir into an ever-expanding web of meaning.”
Again commenting on the writing process with Breene Murphy, contributor to the Citizens Climate Lobby website, Baumgart stated: “The writing of the book was in some ways like documentary film-making—you let someone go on talking for a while and then, as the writer or director, you don’t have to refute them, you just cut and observe an image or fact in conflict with what they’re saying. You don’t have to explicitly tell the reader that you think so-and-so is wrong.”
Christine Mi, reviewer on the Brooklyn Rail website, commented: “Equal parts memoir, investigative reporting, and bizarre dreamscape, China Lake … is an arresting inquiry into the accelerating decay of our planet.” Mi concluded: “In today’s political climate, China Lake is frighteningly timely. Reality is not enough. As our leadership abandons rational discourse on climate change and environmental disaster, maybe Baumgart’s dose of bizarre, surreal storytelling is just what we need to incept our darkening fate.”
Writing on the Los Angeles Review of Books website, Kevin Zambrano suggested: “In the fashion of the New Journalists, Baumgart weaves shoe-leather reportage—interviewing scientists and military personnel and drawing on a mélange of academic texts and US government records—with narratives of his personal experience. … But China Lake’s narrative scenes are more fluid and readable than its relaying of facts. The narrative can move abruptly between discrete pieces of information without an immediate semantic link, giving them a spliced-together feel akin to cinematic montage.” Zambrano added: “The kind of literary nonfiction in which voice and sensibility stand in for an overarching thesis can yield powerful results; so China Lake often does, especially in its depiction of Baumgart’s family life. But it is a delicate line to walk. So much wit, depth of research, observational prowess, as well as activist bona fides are on display throughout the book.”
Anna Call, critic on the Foreword Reviews website, asserted: “China Lake presents in literary form what science has thus far been unable to communicate: climate change may be survivable—maybe—but there’s no telling whether it will be worth the cost. A devastating artistic achievement.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor described the book as “a unique, alarming portrayal of the American military-industrial complex.” The same contributor concluded: “Nearly indescribable and utterly engrossing, this book is an urgent and terrifying cultural reflection, a startling look in the mirror.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2017, review of China Lake: A Journal into the Contradicted Heart of a Global Climate Catastrophe.
ONLINE
Barret Baumgart Website, http://barretbaumgart.com/ (February 12, 2018).
Brooklyn Rail Online, https://brooklynrail.org/ (July 14, 2017), Christine Mi, review of China Lake.
Citizens Climate Lobby, https://citizensclimatelobby.org/ (February 12, 2018), Breene Murphy, author interview.
Foreword Reviews Online, https://www.forewordreviews.com/ (January 10, 2018), Anna Call, review of China Lake.
Los Angeles Review of Books Online, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (May 10, 2017), Kevin Zambrano, review of China Lake.
Los Angeles Review of Books Blog, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/ (June 24, 2017), Landon Bates, author interview.
BARRET BAUMGART’s work has appeared in Vice, the Gettysburg Review, the Seneca Review, the Literary Review, and Camera Obscura. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
If we fail, I can imagine a thousand years from now a small fragment of humankind barely surviving the new planetary climate huddled round a fire in some remote northern latitude observing the night sky, subsisting perhaps as hunter-gatherers on a vastly different and biologically depleted planet listening to a tale vaguely recalled in ancestral memory by the local shaman.
grew up in San Diego, California, studied philosophy at UC Berkeley, and received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Currently I'm based in Los Angeles where I write and work and play drums in the experimental metal band Wreche. My writing has appeared in Guernica, The Iowa Review, Vice, The Gettysburg Review, The Seneca Review, The Literary Review, and Camera Obscura. Contact: barretbaumgart [at] gmail [dot] com.
QUOTED: "The writing of the book was in some ways like documentary film-making—you let someone go on talking for a while and then, as the writer or director, you don’t have to refute them, you just cut and observe an image or fact in conflict with what they’re saying. You don’t have to explicitly tell the reader that you think so-and-so is wrong."
Q&A with “China Lake” author Barret Baumgart
By Breene Murphy
With a Republican House, Republican Senate, and a Republican president, the odds are pretty good that you, like me, work with a Republican representative. For my representative and me, that means addressing national security.
So I read Barret Baumgart’s newly released book “China Lake: A Journey into the Contradicted Heart of a Global Climate Catastrophe,” which is about his own journey to Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake to find out just what the military is working on to fight climate change.
I tracked down Baumgart, and he agreed to an email exchange. Like the book, Baumgart’s writing is quick and at times shocking. Our interview explores the complicated relationship between the military, climate change, and the political right, as well as his approach to writing the book. To read the unedited conversation, head over to the CCL Community here, and to dive much deeper into these topics, check out his book.
Breene Murphy, CCL: Facts play a tricky role in your book. How did you balance that with the relationships between you and your interviewees?
Barret Baumgart: I felt like it wasn’t my job to correct people’s flawed beliefs. The writing of the book was in some ways like documentary film-making—you let someone go on talking for a while and then, as the writer or director, you don’t have to refute them, you just cut and observe an image or fact in conflict with what they’re saying. You don’t have to explicitly tell the reader that you think so-and-so is wrong.
I guess that doesn’t help much though when it comes to persuading your climate-denying Congressman. There’s this phenomenon in psychology called “confirmation bias” which says, basically, that people are more inclined to believe information that confirms their existing beliefs. And further, that you might systematically refute someone’s entire belief system and end up only strengthening it for them. How do you change people’s minds? I’m not sure.
Perhaps one strategy for conversing with climate deniers is to describe SRM, or solar geoengineering, which many still haven’t heard of, in the most stark and dire terms. Describe it as a truly frightening inevitability. Tell them that they’re researching this at Harvard. It isn’t bullshit. Then ask, would you rather go through this chemotherapy or start jogging seriously? Mitigate. Keep the earth in shape. Cut emissions. It will be much easier, much less painful and risky this way.
BM: I find this idea of asking questions like a documentary filmmaker particularly interesting. What is that process is like?
BB: Important people get asked a lot of questions. You don’t want to bore them by forcing them to rehash previous opinions, the same statements they’ve already given to someone more well-known, more intelligent, and better looking than you… That said, you also don’t want to throw someone off—so start with comfortable questions and build a stable rapport. Prior to an interview, I usually write out about fifteen questions which I memorize. Depending on the flow of the conversation I might ask all of them or none. I interviewed Ken Caldeira at Stanford, and he has this amazing quote: “For most, researching ‘geoengineering’ is an expression of despair at the fact that others are unwilling to do the hard work of reducing emissions.” I wanted to ask him about that but I never did. In any case, you have to feel it out.
I doubt Werner Herzog knows what he’s asking long before he asks it, yet he has this amazing knack for listening, seeing into his subject, and asking strange questions that often yield astonishing answers.
BM: Wow, that Herzog interview is amazing! I’ll have to work on his “Squirrel Cuteness” strategy.
You mentioned asking questions that they haven’t heard time and again—obviously that takes a certain level of education—but you’re right that defense, while complex, is very persuasive for some leaders.
BB: It seems madness to me if the people charged with ensuring your national security describe something as a dangerous reality, a “threat multiplier,” and your response is “Naw, we’re good, we don’t worry about that.” There’s serious cognitive dissonance on the right where national security, sovereignty, borders are sacred, inviolable principles that Republicans bend over to protect, but then you mention climate change and suddenly the Pentagon is pursuing some economically ruinous far-left liberal delusion. Rear Admiral David Titley has put it nicely: “The ice doesn’t care about politics, it just melts.” The longer we procrastinate, the deeper the cuts, economically and existentially. To occupy the cold mindset of the Pentagon: purely detached rational self-interest dictates action.
BM: Rear Admiral Titley is actually on CCL’s Advisory Board! It was fun for me to read about him to balance out your despairing view of protest activism.
BB: I find protest on the one hand inspiring, necessary, powerful, yet it can be depressing and self-serving—often it’s a sterilized performative gesture. A weekend sport. It only makes a dent not when the antifa kids start throwing rocks at windows but when the numbers are overwhelming, so much so that the democratic mass cannot be ignored. So far we haven’t seen that with climate.
I was pretty damn pessimistic about the future while writing the book. I didn’t think we’d sign Paris. When we did, and when Hillary adopted some much more strict language about climate and energy, for a while there I was optimistic, and I surprised myself. Of course, with the shock of Trump’s victory, I felt like a dupe… Hillary’s website is still up vowing to make America “the clean energy superpower of the 21st century.” God, that has be one of the most lonely and ghostly corners of the web. You can still click the donate button. Anyway, the recent marches were necessary, but they’re insufficient.
BM: I would agree that the marches aren’t enough. Going back to your findings on confirmation bias, the crucial insight CCL shares is the way to change people’s minds is through relationships. You might find this quieter form of activism valuable and it maybe give you a little hope.
So my last question is an invitation: would you like to come to one of our meetings?
BB: A little hope would be a good thing! Agreed, good old fashioned relationships and conversations that follow from them are probably the best way to change minds. Takes a long time though. I’m not sure the planet has that many collective hours left! Hopefully I’m wrong. Where are your offices? Do you have free coffee?
QUOTED: "I was at my computer reading about the floods sweeping Colorado in September 2013 when I clicked across this conspiracy site that tried to blame cloud seeding. I thought: 'What the hell’s cloud seeding?' So I started reading about the history and this led me to China Lake. China Lake had been on my radar from backpacking in the Sierras and working for the Forest Service."
"I’d also written a little about the Coso Range petroglyphs in an essay I submitted to John D’Agata’s workshop in Iowa. There was a paragraph about the irony of Native American rock art being preserved on a government weapons test facility, which made it into the book. ... Most people read that and were unimpressed. [Laughs.] They said: 'Go further.' But there was a seed there."
"I called it a 'journey' in the subtitle, because that’s what it is. It’s not a book exclusively about climate change—climate, and more specifically the China Lake base, serves as a prism that unlocks all these tangled and previously hidden threads. It’s a journey into all these contradictions and into despair and yet hopefully for the reader it’s also a positive immersive experience."
"The drama is in the information, in the factual reveals and reversals—in setting up readers’ expectations, then undercutting or re-tuning them. I feel at times it’s a movement akin to long poetry. While the book is obviously not a poem, it kind of has the logic of one. There’s a poetic logic running throughout the book that ties the disparate threads, all the imagery, the research, and memoir into an ever-expanding web of meaning."
Barret Baumgart: Navigating Climate Change with a Map of Dead Ends
INTERVIEWS LITERATURE
By
06/24/2017
By Landon Bates
I first met Barret Baumgart in 2007, when we were both undergraduates at U.C. Berkeley. Years later, when I was entering the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, Barret had just graduated from it. He was waist-deep in the writing of this book. I’d sometimes see him around Iowa City in the evenings, after he’d spent 12 or 14 hours at his computer, having eaten little more than rice covered in barbeque sauce. He’d seem both rundown and wired, high from some discovery he’d made during the day’s research. The product of this labor is China Lake: A Journey Into the Contradicted Heart of a Global Climate Catastrophe.
While China Lake centers on climate change and geoengineering, it is made up of a constellation of subjects: the history of cloud seeding and the use of weather modification techniques by the U.S. military; the appropriation of Native American cultures by bourgeois New Ageists; chemtrail conspiracy theorists; the meanings of petroglyphs; and an Emmanuel Leutze painting — among many others. The book is a many-headed beast, a longform essay that fuses investigative journalism, cultural criticism, and memoir. One of my favorite recurring strains —which speaks to just how unusual a work of “environmental” writing this — involves death metal: as he ponders the punishing landscape of the Mojave, Baumgart describes the music he favors as “a bludgeon so far pursued that it subverts its own dissonance.” This is also an apt description of what it feels like to read China Lake. While its dispiriting information threatens to push the reader to despair, Baumgart’s ecstatic prose achieves a kind of transcendence.
¤
LANDON BATES: How did you find your way into this maze of a book? There are so many strands — which came first?
BARRET BAUMGART: I was at my computer reading about the floods sweeping Colorado in September 2013 when I clicked across this conspiracy site that tried to blame cloud seeding. I thought, “What the hell’s cloud seeding?” So I started reading about the history and this led me to China Lake. China Lake had been on my radar from backpacking in the Sierras and working for the Forest Service. I’d also written a little about the Coso Range petroglyphs in an essay I submitted to John D’Agata’s workshop in Iowa. There was a paragraph about the irony of Native American rock art being preserved on a government weapons test facility, which made it into the book. [“…who are we today who protect the traces of past man while, in the same breath, in the same cratered desert, we perfect the art of erasing him from the present?”] Most people read that and were unimpressed. [Laughs.] They said, “Go further.” But there was a seed there.
The book started as your thesis at Iowa. What other advice did you receive there that was useful?
To make the personal thread stronger. My mom was in the book, but the earlier draft started more information-based. I needed a sharper personal hook at the outset.
I was surprised at how earnest that personal thread is. We see moments of your dark humor in scenes with your mom: you’re binge-watching chemtrail conspiracy videos and when your mother asks what you’re watching you respond “Porn”; or the two of you are at a restaurant and you write: “The waiter gave us menus and we both ordered alcohol.” But you write a lot about your upbringing, your father’s absence, your mom’s subscription to what you see as crackpot New Age ideas, her self-medicating, your own teetering toward alcoholism as you dig further into depressing climate change research. The best example of this vulnerability is a picture you include of yourself as a very small boy, sitting cross-legged on a blanket, looking neat and well groomed in tiny sandals, hugging a floppy-eared dog. Was this uncomfortable to include?
The photo felt risky. It’s borderline maudlin for me. I included it because I felt like I needed to show the reader I wasn’t making up all these personal details.
Like the father being a curtain salesman, which you connect to Solar Radiation Management [a geoengineering strategy that would involve spraying chemicals into the stratosphere to create a sort of curtain to block the sun’s rays]?
Exactly. In the picture there’s a dog, whose name, coincidentally, was Sunny. This was a way of trying to show the reader, “I’m not making this shit up. There’s the dog. That’s Sunny.” My mom used to call her Summer Sunshine.
It also has the effect of showing the younger you as innocent, not yet bruised by knowledge and experience, in stark contrast with the narrator, who is super insightful but frequently hungover, kind of jaded, cynical, depressed. I found the photo oddly heartbreaking.
I wasn’t aware of that, but you’re right. It provides a useful counterpoint. It’s like wow, what has he become! I’m glad it worked for you. The entire thing was a balancing act. I didn’t want to write to any particular group or audience. It’s not for liberals, it’s not for conservatives. It’s not straight journalism or memoir. It was about keeping the reader intellectually engaged while still piling on the surprises and shifting modes, and if the reader at times feels disoriented, it’s all still intelligible, I hope. You’re never lost. I wanted an entertaining and informative book, but also one that would make readers uncomfortable and challenge their assumptions on every front.
Did you ever worry that you were adding too much to the stew?
Not really, though I know for some readers it doesn’t work. It depends on what your expectations are going into the book. Some may find the book flawed, unorganized, they can’t tell what it’s about, it’s overly complex. I called it a “journey” in the subtitle, because that’s what it is. It’s not a book exclusively about climate change — climate, and more specifically the China Lake base, serves as a prism that unlocks all these tangled and previously hidden threads. It’s a journey into all these contradictions and into despair and yet hopefully for the reader it’s also a positive immersive experience.
If you had to distill the book’s subject for a random person on the street, though, what would you say?
I’d say, “It’s very broadly about climate change, and more specifically about solar geoengineering.” On average only about one in 10 people I’ve talked to have even heard of geoengineering. Unfortunately, this is going to change. Some have said China Lake is a tableaux, and that that’s okay because we don’t expect literary writing to make an argument — but the book absolutely does make an argument. The argument is that solar geoengineering is likely inevitable. Geoengineering is already quietly built into the Paris Agreement. Not many people seem to be aware of this. Solar geoengineering is not some sci-fi fantasy but a frightening and potentially powerful tool in a portfolio of climate cooling strategies. The research is moving ahead and Harvard is taking the lead.
Were you at all tempted to approach this in a more conventional way, i.e. as a work of topical nonfiction? The subject matter at the heart of the book is obviously timely and urgent. Did you ever worry that your experimental approach would alienate certain readers and mute the book’s potential to inform a wider audience?
On the one hand, it would be amazing if everyone read China Lake. But, on the other, there are already a dozen books about geoengineering, countless books about climate change. That’s been done. And what have they accomplished? Books rarely change the world. Obviously I wanted there to be a wide audience and I’d like to improve our situation but I don’t see many examples of this working out. Al Gore made a movie and won a Nobel Peace Prize. DiCaprio and National Geographic screened their film for free. And yet here we are, with Trump, Pruitt, climate denial, failure. Is it more responsible to do straight informative journalism, is that a more effective approach? I’m not so sure.
I can say though that the only way I could stay intellectually engaged in this subject was if I did it my own way. If I’m going to stick with something, I want to burrow deep down into it. It’s got to have depth. Once inside it’s about listening for resonances, feeling for what’s right there in front of you, but which somehow remained hidden, unseen. You dig these things out and assemble them carefully through art. It’s also the goal of philosophy — to reinterpret, make what is there unfamiliar, fresh or strange in some way. A world with less certainty is paradoxically a more humane and livable world.
You juxtapose the petroglyphs of bighorn sheep at China Lake [which archaeologists say were likely intended to produce rain] with the Navy’s rainmaking efforts there in the form of cloud-seeding experiments. It’s a remarkable coincidence, and there’s an incredible density of connections like this throughout.
Yeah, there’s not a lot of narrative drama related to plot in the book. You’re only with me and my mom for a day in China Lake, and then for a few hours in the Pentagon and at the climate change march. But there’s a feeling of immensity. It’s a little like W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn in that way. With Sebald it’s a walk. You traverse galaxies in a few pages, then he steps out of the research, back into scene, and you find that you’re just on the other side of this bush. You’ve only gone a few steps. The narrative scenes are simply a clothesline on which you hang all your threads, your research. If you stripped it down to the plot alone, there would be no book.
The drama is in the information, in the factual reveals and reversals — in setting up readers’ expectations, then undercutting or re-tuning them. I feel at times it’s a movement akin to long poetry. While the book is obviously not a poem, it kind of has the logic of one. There’s a poetic logic running throughout the book that ties the disparate threads, all the imagery, the research, and memoir into an ever-expanding web of meaning.
Did your publisher have any issue with the structure?
Not really. Since the book won the Iowa Prize, the press wanted what Richard Preston selected. There were little things. They wanted to change the pronoun I used early somewhere when talking about humankind to make it more inclusive. But referring to humankind as “man” was intentional and it gets undercut — man, rational “man,” with all “his” scientific genius and innovation is shown as a vain self-destructive child who must now confront the great Mother Goddesses of prehistory, Gaia and Kali, Mother Earth herself, whom he supposed he had escaped. These Goddesses are not just creators but destroyers. And they’re coming for us. The book attempts to demolish the cliché Marija Gimbutas-esque picture of “The Goddess,” of Nature, as something feminine and benign, a convenient New Age trope that is completely wrong. If we are to grow up as a species, to evolve and survive, humankind will need to learn to treat Nature as more than a resource to master or a mother we ought to love.
You also preserve great chunks of quotations, which gives the book a collage or curatorial quality. It seems partly to belong to the found-text tradition that’s become prominent in the work of writers like David Shields or Kenneth Goldsmith and that dates back at least as far as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project — the heavy use of unfiltered source material.
I often encountered source material that perfectly echoed images or quotes built into the text. I’d think, “Why rewrite this? Let Marty Hoffert speak for himself.” It helped create a density, a plurality, a feeling of world, a world alive in conversation.
And obviously we’re inundated with information nowadays. We’ve got 40 tabs open on our browser. Our phone on the desk next to our laptop while an album streams. The profusion of voices was an intentional formal part of the project. The vast majority of my research came from the internet. The book is printed on paper, but the internet’s own virtual web feels central to the project. This is what was available to me. I wanted to show how one could chisel out something meaningful from thousands of ostensibly garbage hours spent clicking and drifting online. It mirrors the shaman’s journey described in the book — instead of traveling through the rock wall, I traveled through the screen, and the book, unlike a petroglyph, does not certify my contact with supernatural power, but it does record some kind of attempt. The internet is intense. The absence of section breaks in the text relates as well. It’s an attempt to erect a wall. You either hazard the journey and pass through or you don’t.
You posted something on Twitter from Cormac McCarthy that says, “Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.” What kind of psychic toll did writing the book take on you?
When you’re reading all this horrible shit, you don’t really feel like taking care of yourself. But really the toll was more physical than psychic. I have a herniated disc as a result of sitting too long. Which is ironic since my mom has the back issue in the book. Sadly, that came back to haunt me. Faulkner said that if you want to write, you’ll do whatever it takes. You’ll steal from your mother if need be.
I want to know how your mom reacted to her characterization, which is loving and complex, but not without a lot of blemishes.
She kept needling me to send her the book. “When are you going to send it? I’m in the book, I’m entitled to read it.” I’d tell her, “I will, I will.” Finally, I had a conversation with her about certain liberties essayists sometimes take, what is permissible in the genre. [Laughs.] I mentioned that there’s a minor character in the book who’s a composite. She latched onto this idea and convinced herself when reading it that she, too, was a composite. There’s an endnote in which I say that “my mom would like me to tell you that she is a composite character,” but “I find this assessment incorrect. We will argue about this later.”
Like the one you’re mentioning, the endnotes are sometimes surprisingly funny. There’s a lengthy one in which you describe in detail the awkwardness of ordering a burrito on the computer of an eminent geoengineering expert whom you’d gone to Stanford to interview. You describe subsequently sending him reimbursement for the burrito along with a “vintage NOTS China Lake sticker with a rabbit riding an ‘EXPERIMENTAL’ missile through the middle of a question mark.”
Yeah, the endnotes are more than just references. There were things I couldn’t fit into the text but still wanted to tell. Some of them are fun, some are disturbing. It’s worth thumbing through the back to find them, and doing so, you also get a sense of the research wormhole lurking behind the text.
What are you most immediately worried about in terms of climate change?
Well the Paris thing is a fucking disaster. But Paris wasn’t going to achieve its goals anyway. I guess I’m worried that the US exit could unravel the whole thing. It’s so frustrating to hear Trump say the exact same thing that Bush was saying almost 20 years ago, that the agreement is bad for our economy, unfair, threatens jobs in coal, etc. Um, cool. Like there’s a reason we don’t use pagers anymore, or whale oil to light our living rooms. It’s idiotic and the entire argument is point-by-point false. It’s also disturbing to hear him talk about negotiating a new deal.
Even though you think some form of geoengineering will be necessary to avoid catastrophic warming, is cutting greenhouse gas emissions still meaningful? What do you see as the most viable options along those lines?
Well, Hillary Clinton’s proposal, which she’d gotten from Bernie Sanders, to make the US the green energy superpower of the 21st century — this was optimistic, necessary, and achievable. Her campaign website, where her plan is detailed, is still online. It should be on one of those shows, “America’s most disturbing abandoned places” or something. For a moment, I was feeling hopeful after we signed Paris and it seemed Hillary would win.
Be honest, though, were you secretly pleased by Trump’s election and his withdrawal from Paris? I mean, this keeps your book extremely relevant.
Definitely not pleased. Maybe the worse things get, the better it is for the book. When I was in the middle of writing it, the California drought hit an all-time high. Then Trump gets elected and Florida votes itself out of existence. Soon Mar-a-Lago will be underwater, he’ll have alligators swimming through the master bedroom, and the book will start flying off the shelves!
I think we have a perverse desire to see the end of times. Everyone pictures it, all religions are praying for it. As I say in the book, “Every epoch has its apocalypse.” I do wish climate change was just another false alarm but I doubt it is.
In the wake of Trump’s withdrawal from Paris though, it is exciting to see states like California and New York making bold commitments and taking the lead. This could actually have an impact. California is the 5th largest economy in the world.
It’s a little relieving to hear you say that you have at least a sliver of hope. The book partly functions as a sort of a map of dead-ends. I found myself especially overwhelmed when reading the section that toggles back and forth between a tour you went on through the Pentagon and an ineffectual climate change protest you attended in D.C. You fold a ton of information into this section, part of which debunks the viability of options like switching to biofuels. I decided I probably won’t be having kids while reading it.
[Laughs.] A ringing endorsement! That should be a blurb. “I decided I probably won’t be having kids.”
QUOTED: "a unique, alarming portrayal of the American military-industrial complex."
"Nearly indescribable and utterly engrossing, this book is an urgent and terrifying cultural reflection, a startling look in the mirror."
Baumgart, Barret: CHINA LAKE
(Mar. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
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Baumgart, Barret CHINA LAKE Univ. of Iowa (Adult Nonfiction) $19.95 5, 1 ISBN: 978-1-60938-470-8
A unique, alarming portrayal of the American military-industrial complex, the crisis of climate change, and the nature of truth and despair.In 2013, Baumgart was granted a rare visit to China Lake, a 1.1-million acre bombing range in California's Mojave Desert, by way of a tour of the petroglyphs in the Coso Range. Accompanied by his mother, an ailing New Age climate change denier lured by the spiritual significance of the landscape, the author sought to investigate the military's work in atmospheric alteration, examining our global climate crisis and its deep cultural roots through the lens of weather modification and geoengineering. Baumgart delves into the history of cloud seeding and its role as a Cold War weapon. Despite a dubious scientific reputation, related conspiracy theories, and public calls for caution, research in controlling weather progresses today at China Lake as modern cloud seeding is now used in the U.S. and around the world. Baumgart's dreamlike, nonlinear narrative is composed of dizzying juxtapositions, illuminating the parallels and paradoxes of modernity and antiquity, devastation and healing, science and the supernatural. Resisting simple answers and constantly challenging assumptions, the author explores collective and personal anxieties surrounding human-nature relationships and the planet's current peril, interwoven with childhood nostalgia and reflections on family, loss, and time. Summoning the absurd in the ordinary and exposing our rejection of our earthly home, he analyzes technocratic fixes to cultural problems and the unintended consequences of humans playing god, attempting not only to control nature, but to render it a weapon. Can man ultimately harness the world? Will the stars disappear? How will humanity respond to looming extinction? Can the Western world adopt a new narrative? How might we find meaning and cope with despair? In this striking, poetic literary debut, Baumgart examines these questions and others that are profoundly resonant in our time. Nearly indescribable and utterly engrossing, this book is an urgent and terrifying cultural reflection, a startling look in the mirror.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Baumgart, Barret: CHINA LAKE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A485105261/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=839a581e. Accessed 10 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485105261
QUOTED: "China Lake presents in literary form what science has thus far been unable to communicate: climate change may be survivable—maybe—but there’s no telling whether it will be worth the cost. A devastating artistic achievement."
CHINA LAKE
A JOURNEY INTO THE CONTRADICTED HEART OF A GLOBAL CLIMATE CATASTROPHE
Barret Baumgart
University of Iowa Press (May 1, 2017)
Softcover $19.95 (280pp)
978-1-60938-470-8
Combining personal narrative and climate change research, this catastrophic book is capable of shaking the most secure temperament to its core.
The best way to look at China Lake is as a long essay. The author seeks (and obtains) interviews with climate scientists, government tour guides, citizen activists, and other inhabitants of a climate landscape where the line between existential terror and magical thinking is tense to the point of breaking. This is a place where the scientists of the twenty-first century relive ancient shamanistic desire to control the weather; where the darkness of earth worship mingles with New Age belief in mystical healing, where humans are at war with both the earth and the sky. It is, in two words, terrifying and awesome.
The author depicts himself as a slave to his own nature. His attachment to his mother and addiction to nicotine mirror the tension between the desire of the human species to survive and its reliance on oil. The book becomes more impactful by the mixing of the personal into the cosmic. The author himself becomes a sort of shaman, delving into the darkness of climate crisis and depicting what he finds there, in this modern petroglyph.
It is difficult to pin down a specific audience for the book, though many people should read it; covering military, religious, and scientific ground, it may end up being most popular among conspiracy theorists. This is a shame. Its message should be heard more widely, bleak as it is. Ultimately, the book is pessimistic, even despairing. China Lake pulls no punches, sugarcoats nothing, and never, ever talks down. Whom is this book for? The answer is unclear. The fact of its existence is a scream into the void, a statement that should be heard by the gods but which may only reach the ears of other mortals.
China Lake presents in literary form what science has thus far been unable to communicate: climate change may be survivable—maybe—but there’s no telling whether it will be worth the cost. A devastating artistic achievement.
Reviewed by Anna Call
May/June 2017
QUOTED: "In the fashion of the New Journalists, Baumgart weaves shoe-leather reportage — interviewing scientists and military personnel and drawing on a mélange of academic texts and US government records — with narratives of his personal experience. ... But China Lake’s narrative scenes are more fluid and readable than its relaying of facts. The narrative can move abruptly between discrete pieces of information without an immediate semantic link, giving them a spliced-together feel akin to cinematic montage."
"The kind of literary nonfiction in which voice and sensibility stand in for an overarching thesis can yield powerful results; so China Lake often does, especially in its depiction of Baumgart’s family life. But it is a delicate line to walk. So much wit, depth of research, observational prowess, as well as activist bona fides are on display throughout the book."
Only Desert in China Lake
By Kevin Zambrano
0 2
MAY 10, 2017
IN 2017, calling climate change a “catastrophe” just proves you read the news. Rising global temperatures continue to fuel crises worldwide, from water shortages in California and Mexico, to wars in Syria and Yemen, to the smog in northern China that has already shortened the lives of millions. But the overwhelming complexity of our climate (both ecological and political) has confounded any meaningful progress. Humans, hardwired to conceive of ourselves individualistically, seem ill-adapted to apprehend — let alone address — systemic problems. If, as philosopher George Berkeley wrote, “To be is to be perceived,” then, to the millions of individuals whose day-to-day lives continue unimpeded while the planet asphyxiates, the crisis does not really exist. Throughout China Lake: A Journey Into the Contradicted Heart of a Global Climate Catastrophe, winner of the 2016 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction, Barret Baumgart repeats Berkeley’s line, as if he has made it his task to bring this vast, inchoate catastrophe into our perception.
To fully grasp something on the scale of climate change undoubtedly requires a multitude of perspectives, and indeed writers like Elizabeth Kolbert, who blends environmental history with scrupulous field reporting, and Margaret Atwood, whose MaddAddam trilogy imagines a dystopian future brought about by inequality and genetic engineering as well as the failure of Earth’s climate, view the crisis through the unique filter of their own heuristics. But it is doubtful that any book on climate change is as proudly a product of its author’s idiosyncrasies as China Lake, which centers on Baumgart’s tour of Naval Ordnance Test Station China Lake, “a 1.1-million-acre bombing range larger than the state of Rhode Island that abuts Death Valley,” though it includes musings on ultramarathon running, shamanism in pre-Columbian America, chemtrails, rock art, and even Baumgart’s childhood in Southern California.
In the fashion of the New Journalists, Baumgart weaves shoe-leather reportage — interviewing scientists and military personnel and drawing on a mélange of academic texts and US government records — with narratives of his personal experience. (Likewise in their fashion, he pays much attention to what he consumes: burritos eaten, caffeine and alcohol imbibed, e-cigs huffed.) But China Lake’s narrative scenes are more fluid and readable than its relaying of facts. The narrative can move abruptly between discrete pieces of information without an immediate semantic link, giving them a spliced-together feel akin to cinematic montage. One of montage’s pioneers, the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, wrote, “It is art’s task to make manifest the contradictions of being, to form equitable views by stirring up contradictions within the spectator’s mind.” This sounds much like Baumgart’s approach; “I’m still trying to understand the contradictions,” he keeps insisting.
Most salient among these contradictions is that the United States Department of Defense, which spends billions of dollars protecting oil assets across the globe and consumes more fossil fuels than any other entity in the world, also expends more resources than any other entity in the world toward advancing solutions to climate change. (It’s no coincidence that the greenest member of the Trump Administration — albeit an extremely low bar — is the current Secretary of Defense, former General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, a longtime advocate of “unleashing [the military] from the tether of fuel.”) Baumgart views the Pentagon as both the main driver of climate change and humanity’s only hope in combatting it. Unsurprisingly, then, China Lake can slip into easy fatalism:
I feed the dashboard a disk and press the gas pedal down […] The sign says it’s seventy-three miles to Death Valley.
There’s no more mountain left to get behind.
No more shamans […]
Only desert.
This is the close of Baumgart’s personal journey (followed only by a fact- and stats-driven epilogue) — his vision of the road forward: “Only desert.”
Perhaps he inherited his bleak outlook from his mother. In a book full of telling repetitions, the line she repeats is the most disquieting: “Bump, bump,” i.e., “If I get sick, drop me behind the car, put it in reverse, and back over me.” Then, too, Baumgart writes about two of the bleakest places in the world: Death Valley and the Pentagon. This focus is a consequence of his pragmatic approach to reckoning with climate change, the exploration of two seemingly workable fixes: weather modification and biofuels. However, with a deluge of information, Baumgart adumbrates each option’s irreconcilable scientific, financial, and political pitfalls. Biofuels are expensive, inefficient, and often do not even offset carbon pollution, and with weather modification techniques (the most horrifying example being Solar Radiation Management, which Baumgart informs us “involve[s] dumping millions of tons of opaque white sulfur aerosol dust into the stratosphere to reflect the sun’s light back out into space”) the cure may be as bad as the disease. Neither biofuels nor geo-engineering prove to be actual improvements to the system; rather, they are climate hacks, flailing shortcuts that fail to address the fundamental causes of the problem.
And the causes are not mysterious. The US government first acknowledged climate change in 1965, when a Johnson Administration report acknowledged that “[t]hrough his worldwide industrial civilization, man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment” by pumping carbon dioxide into the air, which “will almost certainly cause significant changes in the temperature and other properties of the stratosphere.” Even so, Baumgart writes, “Nowhere does the report acknowledge the possibility of limiting the burning of fossil fuels.” George W. Bush’s objection to the Kyoto Protocol, he explains, was due to its “negative economic impact, with layoffs of workers and price increases for consumers.” Though Baumgart never explicitly makes the argument, it is clear to the reader that we will not find solutions to climate change without asking questions about industrial capitalism.
And yet: The only time a variant of the word capitalism comes up in China Lake is in a quote by Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Tewksbury, where he seems to confuse anti-capitalism for a basic sort of humanism: “The public’s understanding [of “energy security”] must transcend the anti-capitalist chants of ‘no blood for oil’ and public distrust of oil corporations.” Baumgart sarcastically dismisses Tewksbury’s paper as “very fine literature” and uses it as evidence that “pity for Mother Earth and her children was not the primary impetus behind the Pentagon’s pursuit of fossil fuel alternatives.” However, as is true when he emphasizes that the military “cannot […] support investment in clean energy technology solely for civilian purposes or environmental relations,” the reader wishes Baumgart would question the economic assumptions that undergird these positions.
Baumgart juxtaposes his tour of the Pentagon with a climate protest he attends the following day. He skeptically mills around, finding the whole thing self-congratulatory. “I used to be an activist,” he writes. And then:
Activism is a depressing game […] Apathy and complacency are death, no doubt, but nobody rewards your passion, your action, or your belief. They call you a bum, a bastard, an anarchist, and anti-American, or they simply tolerate your naïveté. I got kicked out of my high school graduation ceremony for speaking my mind, never received my diploma, and didn’t change anything. It’s possible, though, that I’ve been approaching everything the wrong way.
One wants to ask, “What would the right way be?” but to upbraid a literary writer for failing to answer such questions would be to make a category mistake. Literary nonfiction, especially the gonzo tradition that Baumgart works in, does not need to advance an argument; China Lake is rather a journey into the self, through the lens of climate change. The “contradicted heart” brought into perception turns out to be Baumgart’s own. By this measure, the book is unquestionably successful. But it also explains why complex, structural solutions (such as, for example, upgrading and redesigning the United States’s century-old electricity distribution grid) get ignored in favor of mythical panaceas like blotting out the sun or fueling cars with algae.
The kind of literary nonfiction in which voice and sensibility stand in for an overarching thesis can yield powerful results; so China Lake often does, especially in its depiction of Baumgart’s family life. But it is a delicate line to walk. So much wit, depth of research, observational prowess, as well as activist bona fides are on display throughout the book. But when Baumgart, a grad student from the (once-CIA-funded) Iowa Writers’ Workshop, fresh from official tours of military facilities, takes weary nips from his flask, barely tolerating the naïveté of people who have not yet given up on the future (and facile targets at that: had he waited a few months, he could have attended in the People’s Climate March in Manhattan, which had 10,000 times more protesters), some readers might be repelled. And later, at the end of his quotation-laden book, when he offers up that bleak, simplistic vision of the future — “Only desert” — those same readers might recall another famous quote, the one by critic Fredric Jameson, about how it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
¤
Kevin Zambrano is a writer from Long Beach, California.
QUOTED: "Equal parts memoir, investigative reporting, and bizarre dreamscape, China Lake: A Journey into the Contradicted Heart of a Global Climate Catastrophe ... is an arresting inquiry into the accelerating decay of our planet."
"In today’s political climate, China Lake is frighteningly timely. Reality is not enough. As our leadership abandons rational discourse on climate change and environmental disaster, maybe Baumgart’s dose of bizarre, surreal storytelling is just what we need to incept our darkening fate."
Changing Climate
by Christine Mi
A fighter jet slices through the mute heat of the desert, momentarily chasing off strange mirages and small lizards. Tucked away in the desiccated hellscape between California’s Death Valley and Mojave Desert sits a sprawling military research complex—the largest U.S. Navy landholding in the world. Barret Baumgart’s debut book begins here, at Naval Air Weapons Station: China Lake.
Barret Baumgart, China Lake: A Journey Into the Contradicted Heart of a Global Climate Catastrophe (University of Iowa Press, 2017)
Equal parts memoir, investigative reporting, and bizarre dreamscape, China Lake: A Journey into the Contradicted Heart of a Global Climate Catastrophe—which won the Iowa Prize in Literary Nonfiction—is an arresting inquiry into the accelerating decay of our planet. True to its desert setting, Baumgart’s narrative is rife with extremes. Scientific jargon clashes with Internet conspiracy, Native American folklore with New-Age woo woo; man with government; science with fringe. At the core of this dizzying journey is Baumgart’s desire to understand the environmental ambitions of the American military, the largest single consumer of energy in the world. What does the Pentagon have to do with the climate?
Baumgart’s language is haunting and hallucinatory. A kaleidoscopic trip through drought-addled Californian deserts, lush Vietnam rainforests (where the military first attempted to weaponize the weather), and ultimately, the LEED-certified white hallways of the Pentagon. China Lake is energetic, at times fanatical with its verbosity. But it is consistently masterful, and it is with great skill that Baumgart negotiates the disparate threads of journalistic research, personal observation, and his own searingly vivid imagination. He does not show so much as he thrusts the reader into his work, weaving between seemingly unrelated subjects like defense spending, heavy metal lyrics, and his mother’s alcohol addiction. China Lake navigates a universe of topics within a single breath. The result is a surreal, original work that simultaneously entertains and terrifies.
Baumgart’s book first takes us beyond the barbed wire fences of the China Lake weapons testing facility, where he hopes to uncover information about government weather modification research. The protected military compound houses approximately 250,000 rock carvings by ancient Shoshone-Paiute shamans, mostly depicting bighorn sheep in an attempt to summon rain; a form of early weather modification. Visits today are tightly controlled and closely monitored. Many of the tourists are New Age hippie types seeking—and often appropriating—Native American divinity, cherry-picking the anthropology of shamanism to suit their own interests. They pilgrimage to holy Indian sites, consuming auras and stolen spiritual energy.
Some of the later petroglyphs depict men in pointed hats riding strange creatures. These were white men, who—after manifesting their destiny across the West—would later transform the sacred springs of China Lake’s Coso Range into tourist baths and bottle up the holy water to sell to Caucasian hippies, forcing the natives to hold their important spiritual traditions at odd, dark hours. They would study the indigenous petroglyphs and misattribute them to the work of aliens or misidentify them as hunting murals, unwilling to simply engage with the surviving tribes and ask.
The irony is not lost on Baumgart.
“Who are we today who protect the traces of past man while, in the same breath, in the same cratered desert, we perfect the art of erasing him from the present?”
The bite of irony runs deep throughout China Lake. As Baumgart’s sprawling investigation into weather modification and geoengineering takes him from conspiratorial YouTube video comments to a research facility at Stanford University, then across the continent to the nation’s capital, he realizes something. The U.S. military does not need to secretly seed pregnant clouds or pump millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in a crude effort to block sunlight in order to modify the weather. The Pentagon consumes more energy than any other institution on the planet—meaning it probably emits more carbon dioxide than anyone else. Our military, simply by existing and operating, is already modifying the weather. Forget the conspiracy theories on chemtrails and secret government experiments: it’s happening right before our eyes.
But ultimately, China Lake is as much a critique on man as it is a warning against the military-environmental complex and climate disaster. Baumgart dissects our collective folly with a surgical blade. A generation of people so self-interested that we ignore rationality, opting instead to live in the fiction of our minds and addictions.
“As Americans, we tend to seek good without evil, love devoid of hate, and Christ without Lucifer. We avoid pain, pay millions of dollars to watch the same happy Hollywood endings, and spend our lives driving among various pharmaceutical, spiritual, and self-medicating cures.”
In today’s political climate, China Lake is frighteningly timely. Reality is not enough. As our leadership abandons rational discourse on climate change and environmental disaster, maybe Baumgart’s dose of bizarre, surreal storytelling is just what we need to incept our darkening fate. Because in the end, “the ice doesn’t care about politics or Democrats of Republicans: it just melts.”