Natural Connections: How Do We Know The Moon?

“‘I know the moon,’ said the fox.”

My colleague read this title line aloud from a children’s book recently, as part of a staff training. At first, I was just as enchanted with the story as she was. The fox goes on to describe how the Moon is like a rabbit that he can chase across the night. I nodded at this description.

Long ago I encountered a lovely retelling of an Ojibwe story called Rabbit and the Moon. In an act of friendship and generosity, Crane carries Rabbit to the Moon, since Rabbit cannot jump that high. Whenever I see a full Moon, I try to pick out the shadows that hint at Rabbit’s long ears. I also see a rabbit in the Moon.

The moth disagrees with the fox, though. They see the Moon as a great cocoon. The owl knows the Moon as light shining out of a window. The bullfrog sees a lily pad floating on the surface of a pond. The language is poetic and the descriptions are whimsical, but in a children’s book there must be a lesson. The animals start bickering about who’s right. They decide to visit A Man of Science, and each Being hopes that he will confirm their perspective.

I was enjoying the story immensely up to that point, and even related to the idea that everyone wants science to support their favorite theory. Then the Man of Science spoke from his high tower. He declared that the Moon was nothing more than cold, dusty, crusty sand, plus a slew of facts and figures. As you can imagine, the animals weren’t happy with that answer. But, united against the scientist’s perspective, they went home with a greater appreciation of the many ways their group of friends knows the Moon.

I felt ashamed. I think of myself as a very science-minded person, and I sensed that the author was trying to make some point about how the facts and figures of science are out to squash wonder in the world. How horrible that would be!

But as I thought about the depiction of the stuffy old man in a tower spouting information from books and declaring “To be sure, the moon is that and nothing more,” I realized that the author had constructed a strawman argument by setting up a simplistic imagined opponent that’s easy to knock down.

In real life, I don’t know any scientists who even remotely resemble the Man of Science in this story. The scientists I know are full of wonder and excitement about whatever it is they study, and pretty much everything else as well. As scientists, they are open to new information that might change their current understandings, and are well aware that we don’t know even a fraction of everything there is to know.

For example, the Man of Science declares that the Moon is made of sand, as if that’s boring. But sand here on Earth is fascinating! In one of my early geology classes, Professor Tom Fitz jumped on a desk because he was so excited by a rock. Each sand-sized clast in the stone was perfectly polished quartz with a billion years of history.

How do we know the Moon? Everyone has their own relationship with the Earth’s beautiful satellite. Photo by Emily Stone.

They had paused their journey in an environment of deposition so unique that each clast was almost exactly the same size as every other one. Later that year I walked on a beach—the tombolo at Stockton Island in the Apostle Islands—made from similar sand grains and they sang beneath my shoes.

When I taught kids in California, we looked closely at handfuls of sand born in the uber productive waters of the Pacific Ocean. Not only did a rainbow of minerals shine like jewels, but fragments of every type of seashell and tidepool detritus taunted us with mysterious patterns as we tried to guess their origins.

Of course, sand on the Moon is neither rounded and sorted nor full of seashells. From a Radio Lab podcast I learned that Moon sand is razor sharp! With no wind or water to bang pieces of rock against each other, there’s no mechanism to round off the corners of rock fragments created by impacts from tiny micrometeorites or impressive asteroids.

As for the Moon being what that strawman knows and nothing more, scientists haven’t even agreed on exactly how the Moon was formed, and we’re continually learning about how it impacts life on Earth. Midwesterners don’t often encounter the Moon’s tug on ocean tides, but the pull of the Moon on the core of the Earth likely contributes to the maintenance of the Earth’s magnetic field, as well as shifts in the magnetic field’s strength that influences plants, snowshoe hares, lynx, and more.

New discoveries about the Moon abound, and the scientists are excited. I don’t have space to share them here, but I’ll link a few more Moon references in my Natural Connections blog. In my view, it’s lucky that this book by Stephen Anderson is out of print. Scientists deserve a place in our worldview right alongside those animals to look up at the Moon and think about all the possibilities it contains.

Teaching kids—and everyone—to practice empathy and open-mindedness is great, but giving children an incorrect view of science and scientists isn’t going to help them navigate our changing world. It isn’t going to help them to know the Moon.

Emily’s brand-new third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

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