Environmental Stewardship

By "Cosmic Environments," I meant environments elsewhere in the cosmos. However, every environment is part of the cosmos. Earth is not only irradiated by the nearest star, Sol, but also composed of elements generated by stellar fusion throughout the universe.

SM Stirling's Emberversers express a common attitude to their environment but in different ways:

marking out what is rightly the domain of the Lady Flidais;
National Parks;
rights under Forest Law;
the biodiversity of riparian wetlands and watershed maintenance;
God's command to the sons of Adam to be wise stewards;
what White Buffalo Woman says we can take...

Difference without division. Unity without uniformity.

Chee Lan

Blog correspondent, Michael Silverling, scanned this interior art picture of Chee Lan from the Analog magazine serialization of Poul Anderson's Satan's World. The art is by Kelly Freas.

This pictured follows one of Adzel.

Since Chee Lan, like Adzel, is operating in an alien environment, this post will first be published on the Poul Anderson's Cosmic Environments blog and will later be copied to Poul Anderson Appreciation.

Adzel

Blog correspondent, Michael Silverling, scanned this interior art picture of Adzel from the Analog magazine serialization of Poul Anderson's Satan's World. The art is by Kelly Freas.

Adzel is carrying someone: David Falkayn?

Michael thought that I might find the art of interest and I thought that blog readers might.

Since Adzel is running through an alien environment, this post will be published on the Poul Anderson's Cosmic Environments blog and will later be copied to Poul Anderson Appreciation.

By The Lyubisha River

On Dennitza, the Kazan is a large astrobleme. During glaciation, a colter of ice pierced the Kazan ringwall, then the melt-begotten Lyubisha River formed a canyon. Flandry watches the broad, brown river which is:

"...quiet except where it chuckled around a boulder or a sandbar near its banks."
-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 339-606 AT p. 524.

(In Anderson's Time Patrol series, time is compared to a river with changeable features like sandbars that can divert its course.)

"...ocherous palisades..." are "...maned with forest." (ibid.) Leaves are bluish-green or plum-coloured.

"...trees...grew taller than the taiga granted." (ibid.)

My points are, first, that Anderson shows us an alien landscape where, e.g., we must not assume that leaves are Terretrial green and, secondly, that his vocabulary is rich even when describing features that might be common to Earth and Dennitza.

A Dennitzan Forest

On Dennitza, Dominic Flandry and Kossara Vymezal land in a forest. Poul Anderson must show that this forest is not interchangeable with a Terrestrial equivalent. There is:

mahovina turf;
woodland "duff," the two relevant meanings of "duff" being plant litter and detritus;
the local equivalent of evergreens - low, gnarly trees, their branches plumed blue-black;
shrubbery but no real underbrush;
open sod.

Anderson sometimes describes a local equivalent of grass, e.g., on Aeneas, Avalon, Talwin and here.

There is also "...a meadow of long silvery quasigrass..." on Starkad. (Ensign Flandry, Chapter Eighteen IN Young Flandry, p. 187)

Shalmu has "...whispering silvery psuedograss..." (The Rebel Worlds, Chapter Three IN Young Flandry, p. 394)