Injecting Substack With Some Classic Weblog DNA
I am going to mess with the model...
Substack is a great platform. It is easy to write posts and drop all sorts of media into them. It is easy to distribute posts to an email list and, if you choose, try to monetize your work with paid subscriptions (okay, the monetizing part is not so easy). For writers who like to work independently, it is a revolutionary publishing tool.
BUT, BUT, BUT…you’d better make sure that whatever you are publishing is worthy of adding yet one more email to the spammed-out email inboxes of your subscribers. Only a true unicorn can crank out worthwhile content more than a few times a week without triggering the modern and easily triggered spam defense known as Reader Unsubscribe.
This creates a conundrum for me because I collect lots of random links to stuff that I think is worth SHARING but not EMAILING. I’ve added this sort of content to the end of newsletters, but I always feel like asking readers to digest a bunch of links after reading a few hundred words risks making me John Cleese offering Mr. Creosote “a wafer thin mint.” I can (and sometimes do) post quick content to Twitter or Instagram. But Twitter is a sh*tshow these days, and I have found Instagram to be most useful for posting video logs from the decks of Laughing Gull (more coming once she is back in the water in October). So I found myself wishing that Susbtack was more like my old website, where I could drop any link or info I liked without imposing on readers because they didn’t get notifications every time I posted; they were opting to visit my site whenever they felt like it.
Well, I figured out a way to grant my own wish: I will continue to send out the occasional Substack newsletter when I have something email-worthy (hopefully) to say. But I will also drop links, short commentary and other info that catches my attention into posts on my Substack page that I won’t email around. If you want to see this sort of news and notes from the Anthropocene Era, simply visit my Substack page anytime you have a few minutes to indulge your curiosity. And if you use an RSS reader—my favorite is Feedly—just add Sailing Into The Anthropocene to your RSS feed. In short, I am injecting some old-fashioned weblog DNA into Substack to produce a Genetically Modified Newsletter (GMN; all organic, no animals harmed). Hopefully, it will be a GMN that is immune to boredom.
Here is a sample of the sort of content I am talking about:
Burning Man Burns (and Consumes, and Pollutes) Too Much: I love the idea of Burning Man. But like all good ideas Burning Man got too popular, and became a bucket list event for people who think it is cool but don’t really subscribe to the planet-friendly ethics it espouses. They fly in, buy a bunch of camping stuff, burn lots of gas and propane to party comfortably, and then jet out leaving piles of dust-caked gear in local thrift shops and piles of trash in the desert for others to pick up. This is one of the best explanations of why the whole muddy mess is broken (click on image):
If you want more, here is a thoughtful journalist struggling to rationalize further attendance at Burning Man.
Stuck: When an adventure cruise ship goes aground off Greenland, it is yet another good reason to re-think adventure cruises:
The grounding of a luxury cruise ship off the coast of Greenland on Monday highlighted the irony of touring the fast-warming Arctic on vessels powered by fossil fuels, the main culprit in climate change. But the incident also underscores the recent growth of marine traffic in the region, a trend that raises the risk of accidents and pollution in hard-to-reach places.
Global warming is destroying vast tracts of polar ice, opening previously frozen sea routes through the Arctic for longer periods. In the case of Greenland — where the Ocean Explorer was mired in glacial silt in a remote fjord before finally being freed Thursday — cruise ship traffic has risen 50% in the last year, to about 600 ships, according to Brian Jensen of the Danish military’s Joint Arctic Command.
That trend is seen across the Arctic. “From the period of 2009 to 2018, ship traffic on a pan-Arctic scale doubled,” said Paul Berkman, lead author of a 2022 report on the subject published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Ship traffic is increasing as sea ice is decreasing.”
Worth Fighting For: Sutton Lynch is devoting himself to photographing the majestic beauty of sea life off Long Island:
Sutton Lynch rises most days before the sun, arriving at Atlantic Beach in Amagansett, N.Y., for the early-morning calm. It’s the same beach he’s been going to since he was a child, and where he worked as a lifeguard for years as a teenager. Now 23, he spends his mornings surveying the horizon. When he spots activity on the water’s surface, he sends out his drone.
Mr. Lynch has earned a devoted following on Instagram for his remarkable footage of marine life off the coast of the East End of Long Island. Alongside images and videos of humpbacks, hammerheads, dolphins, bluefish and many other species, he writes captions that range from childhood memories and research on the effects of fishing policy to explanations of animal behavior. Across the board, his work exudes a reverence for the ocean and the creatures that call it home.
The planet needs more chroniclers like Sutton Lynch (follow him here). They help everyone understand what is at stake.
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