229-35

Earth thought 229 of 365: Trust ... is beautiful. Politics seems almost ever without it, without real trust, emotional trust. In our lives, pragmatic trust reigns, and we seldom encounter the relational, emotional variety. How does this latter variety affect our relations with nature, if at all? Calm inside, because I am trusted, I linger over the day, rather than rushing through it.

Earth thought 230 of 365: Walking or running? Walking brings me closer to plants unfurling, to small spiders hopping. Running, however, makes me feel the exertion of the day --squirrels scrambling up a tree, deer pushing off ahead of dogs and people, the ever-intent bee.

Earth thought 231 of 365 : Can nanotechnology and genetic engineering help us repopulate our world with biodiversity once our currently caused mass extinction is largely complete? I don't know -nobody does now. What role is this idea playing? Is it a counter to despair? That seems hard to go, to me, since the worst news is that we are so thoughtless as to be destroying much if not most of life's current forms. Is the idea a rationalization for doing less to curb the extinction? Then it's bad news, isn't it, since it uses a wishful fantasy (as far as we presently know) as smoke and mirrors to deflect responsible action.

Earth thought 232 of 365 : Drivers. Rivers. Soundless. (Almost) Sun-siding. Immaterial. Polluting.

233 of 365:: Sprinklers. For kids -kids, especially. A use of abundant water in a world of plenty. Floods. Where infrastructure wanes and relief is spotty. The sadness with water as more vapor clears the air.

234 :: 365 : Color affects me like nature -viscerally altering my mood before I know it.

Earth thought 235 of 365 : I understood tonight why my Ohio cousins, growing up, always took showers before going to bed (rather than in the morning) -it was an ecological necessity given Cleveland humidity in the summer! By the end of the day, a layer of stickiness has settled well into one's pores. Only a shower seems a human way to cool down and go to bed relatively clean.

Earth thoughts 222 to 228

222-- It is easy to make fun of eco-uptightness. You know, the person whose face, when she hears you don't compost, must hide the frisson of shock. Nobody's going to die if you throw out that banana peel. But underneath the peel-recycling neurotic is the impotence of the single actor inside the larger disorder. She can't possibly do enough, because the system is unsustainable. Overly-conscious, she tries to make us acquire something basic, like a bird learning to fly by crashing into windows. We don't yet know what it is to be sustainable.

223 - A water harvester 1. A machine that harvests lake weeds, rather than killing them with chemicals. It rotates slowly across the water near the shore - and later loads its harvest onto a truck that takes the weeds to nearby farms to use as they may. 2. A person sitting in a boat, catching evening wind and sun.

224 (revised later in the day) - The governmental news is that the Gulf Oil spill is dissipating, being absorbed, and being remediated to a great extent. In turn, the long range effects on Gulf ecosystems and the social ecology of humans -so the suggestion goes- appear to be bearable, much less severe than expected, or maybe not severe at all. If this were true, it would be good news! Yet in the New York Times's Dot Earth Blog, many esteemed ocean scientists expressed two things: 1. That we are largely ignorant of what the long-range effects might be, especially since chemical dispersal agents are being used to get the oil off the water's surface, where they filter down into more invisible parts of the ecosystem. 2. That the long term effects of past massive spills -e.g. the Exxon Valdez spill- have themselves been extensive, much greater than expected, and to both non-human ecology and human economy. Moreover, as Breena Holland reminded me, the U.S. government has a bad record of environmental reporting: for instance, they said D.D.T. was all right. How would they know now about the spill, when so little time has passed, no study of dispersal agents has ever been thoroughly done for the public eye, and no external experts have had a chance to vet their evidence? Arthur Evenchik called this a recipe for bad reporting, citing the New York Times as irresponsible in taking the government at its word without using independent sources with scientific authority. I worried over the past months about the spill's vast effects (cf. 177, 167, 156), based on reports from credible sources about the threat of the spill to the future of Gulf life both human and non-human. Was I over-reacting? Where do we turn to sort out this mess, when the government appears eager to calm people's fears and the needed sums of money have not been set up to create the systematic scientific study over years and decades that these questions need and merit?

225 -- "[A]ll that's certain is that "the form of the oil has shifted. Dispersed oil is still oil. It's just in a different form."" (Michael J. Blum, Tulane University, quoted in David Fahrenthold, "Scientists Question Government Team's Report of Shrinking Oil Spill", Washington Post, August 5th, 2010) This is a good comment. What B.P. has done is to push the oil away from the shore -good!- and from the public eye -intended?- where even science has no clue what will happen. B.P. did right in saving the shore as much as possible using what they had, but they -and my government- do no good if what they suggest is that the problem is thereby solved for the Gulf's ecosystems. No one knows that -the effects are invisible and largely unknown even to science. We are up against a swirling mystery like deep sea waters. So the environment often is -and the right stance is humility and caution, exactly what B.P. did not have.

Earth thought 226 of 365 - New York is an ecological city by default, in comparison to almost all U.S. towns. Its density makes it the winner. Sharing infrastructure, concentrating transportation, and covering less land, it does better than lawn on lawn, than development on development of sprawling suburban America. All the home recycling goes to naught compared to the first decision -the choice of density.

Earth thought 227 of 365 : Graciousness is a quality expressed by some acts, and it is a virtue of character. The gracious person welcomes others in, and gives way to others so that cooperative living may ensue. There are many motives behind graciousness -e.g., humility, gratitude, practicality, obligation, .... What matters is the quality. And what would city living be if we as a people were for the most part gracious to Earth others, if, when we ate, we made room for them cooperatively? Across the street, a migration corridor, and on the roof, a garden where birds nest for the night, cooing from time to time half asleep while you eat your burger (one where the cow lived a good life and died a painless death)?

Earth thought 228 of 365 : There are many different things to be said for relationships and their depth. I am talking of relationships between people. Part of what goes into the sense that we are self-centered with respect to the environment is a result, I think, of how much meaning we plunge into when we plunge into the inter-human. There is here neither self-absorption nor selfishness, but an effect of refocused attention.

215-221

215 - As Phil Cafaro notes, institutions can also make us greedy or apathetic. For instance, abstract democracies where sound-bytes rule and people do little more than vote make us apathetic in many respects. Accountability mechanisms that tie promotion and bonuses to quarterly returns make us squeeze the present at the expense of the future. Look at the decision-making that led to the B.P. oil spill. So these institutions breed greed -taking more than is prudent or fair. There are many kinds of institutions from the standpoint of those that hinder responsible environmental behavior. A good taxonomy of them would be helpful.

216 - A taxonomy of institutions that are helpful for responsible environmental behavior would also be useful. How many different kinds are there currently in, say, mainstream U.S. society? By pointing to kinds of institutions, too, we would avoid the problem of listing regulatory bodies. The question is how rich a fabric of institutions we have across the many levels and sectors of society. So, in addition to federal regulatory bodies like the E.P.A., we can acknowledge educational programs -say, in the Park Service or in schools. But what else? And what about institutions that are indirectly helpful, which aren't intended to produce responsibility for the environment but which nevertheless do?

217 - At a theoretical level, one of the concepts that remains unclear (to me, at least) is a concept of how an institution *shapes* character. I would guess that there are many ways -e.g., incentives, which may make it profitable to pollute; deterrents, which may make it too painful to challenge a government's (China's) environmental injustices; limits, which may make it hard for your typical worker to have time to read up on environmental problems, if they cross his mind; and so on. But even these indications have substantial opaqueness within them. What is it about a limit that is reasonable? For instance, we should not accept the limitations of work tasks as sufficient excuses for failing to stop a murder on the street outside one's office building simply by calling the police. But it seems reasonable to accept that if I have a zillion things to do in one day, I might be excused from reading the latest E.P.A. report on toxicity in my city. Is it, though? Are these so-called limits just masks for values that we do not want to squarely face, e.g. that toxic slow death -we assume- is not nearly as bad as murder? And yet that seems hardly justifiable. Toxic slow death might not be intentionally caused, but it's still very, very bad -especially when it's a kid who gets the cancer.

218 - At the core of the problem about institutions and when they provide an excuse for thoughtless behavior is the notion of reasonable conscientious effort. Only when people have been reasonably thoughtful and yet still unintentionally produced thoughtless results might we look at the institution as a limit, producer, or enabling condition of thoughtlessness. The manager who tried his best to fulfill his work, enjoy his family and be a good citizen, yet who simply didn't have time in his day to track down all the environmental impact reports that the organization didn't have a system to get to him is not to blame for unintentionally promoting bad environmental actions by the corporation. The C.E.O. who became aware of environmental impacts and did not form a system within his organization to process and distribute them, a system with teeth that backed them up and demanded taking them as salient -he is.

219 - Everything has its system. And what's ours? We design products to be thrown away when they break or are superseded by some other more efficient version of them. We ignore renewable energy and use our nest-egg resources, like coal and oil. There's a massive impatience to all this, like a fed-up person grabbing for satisfaction that can be forced out without too much thought, balance, reticence, or art. Now, now. "And forget the problems later; I don't have time for them."

220 - Reading up on how common household items abrade carcinogenic particles, or particles bad for the lungs, or otherwise toxic things; reading how common household items off-gas poisonous gases, or those which produce allergies, asthma or other nasty things -- this is a sobering thing to do. And when I realize that parts are outsourced from parts of the world where little limitation is placed on what goes into a product ... then I really start to wonder about the impatience of our production. We don't take the elementary time across decades to see whether our experiments unintentionally harm. The budget sensitive manager doesn't care what they do in X-part-of-the-world so long as the part is cheap. And the regulators back home don't have time to check the offshore parts coming in.

221 - I feel that not enough attention is given in philosophy to friendship circles, or friendship branches (branching off interlinkings of friends of friends of ...). Philosophers focus on friendship between two as -since Aristotle- an aspect of human flourishing. But political philosophers jump from the individual to the macro-scale of the societal without considering the level of friends and of how friends organize, informally, within themselves and branching off, social change. Environmentalists, too, have this vice. There are the hermits -the Thoreaus- and then there are the activists -the Carsons- militating for society-wide transformation, usually regulatory in some form. In between, however, are linkages of friends who influence each other and who -can- pass along environmental wisdom and experimentation. This is soft social change, quiet and effective in its own way.

208-214

Earth thought 208 of 365 : "I have lost my origin. And I don't want to find it again." (Bjork) In Bjork's mouth, this is free-floating desire, an openness to new identity, to what is beyond identity. Ironically -for such an ecologically conscious person as her- it is also a perfect expression of our collective global fantasy. We will find our origin again, whether we want to or don't.

Earth thought 209 of 365 : Hollywood movies love to play with the idea that reality is dream. How consoling. A twentieth century thought in a world supposedly constructed from sheer desire -psychology and capitalism in one. But the twenty first century thought is this -our world has limits. Reality will come pouring in if we don't respect them. That's called sea-level rise, not some dream of flooding water. That's called water shortage, not some fantasy of the lone Versace dress on the desert, wearing a mannequin inside.

Earth thought 210 of 365 : I wonder, is time running out on us to establish an effective international, environmental order? I sometimes think that the waters of climate change will flood in on us, so to speak, making our dithering about obsolete. And yet that point of pressure will be too late. That is my midnight worry.

Earth thought 211 of 365 : This has been a bad year for environmental disasters. The people of Haiti suffered immensely, because we design our cities poorly and allow whole sections of the world to grow unimaginably rich while others languish. This tendency, known as "uneven development", coincides in the last quarter century with a tendency of the global economy to draw the countrysides into increasingly massive and dense cities. Mexico City is a classic example, but Port au Prince was too. And there, in that overly dense place saturated with low income laborers, cheap landlords and corner-cutting builders made their score. The combined effects were tragedy when joined with an act of nature.

Earth thought 212 of 365 : The tragedy in Haiti was horrific. But the tragedy under the Gulf of Mexico is still largely opaque. People respond with empathy to loss of human life and of livelihood, but the lives of others, of fish and bird, of sponge and mollusk -these are largely veiled as if by a deep sea of consciousness, cloudy and fading from the light.

Earth thought 213 of 365 : The trick with multitasking is to let go of inessential things; stuff whose omission might inconvenience, but which is simply not important in the long run. To clear out time to address big environmental problems, I find it helpful to multitask in that way.

Earth thought 214 of 365 : What do popular environmental films like Avatar do? Is it even an environmental film, as commonly described? Avatar engages in a fantasy by which eco-centric beings beat the military-industrial complex. Wish. Not just because these beings win -seldom do the colonized have acts of nature to help them- but also because the problem is hardly that simple. We aren't just fighting steel-cold greed. We're fighting pervasive ignorance and unconcern that shaped our institutions at a time when few thought we had any pressing need to be environmentally minded. To take one example, the founding fathers of the U.S. Constitution did not foresee a world where term-limits and lobbying can substantially thwart long-range planning for environmental matters that don't carry a present cash value. They weren't being greedy -they were just unconcerned out of ignorance. And countless of our institutions are like that.

Earth thoughts 201-207

Earth thought 201 of 365 : One of the favorite pot-shots of anti-environmentalists and environmental romantics alike is to point out how some aspect of our lives does not conform to environmentalism. Then, each says, don't fool yourself in thinking that you try to protect the environment, because -e.g.- you took a flight to California this year. Or, you drank imported wine. There is a grain of truth in. these views, as well as a pound of misdirection. The truth is this: if we don't consume or pollute, we simply don't burden the environment. And doing each less is less burdensome. Check. But also, we are embroiled in an unsustainable system and ethical life is complex -there are many goods we have reason to acknowledge and respect, not just environmental ones. Thus, the sound person will be involved in some burdensome behavior until we completely transform our society. And this is where both the anti-environmentalists and the romantics are blind. They avoid the political, non-individual nature of the problem. The former think the status quo is just fine, and the latter search for purists and hermits. But even the purist will only be helpful in the way she signifies a social message, spurring us all to change the nature of our institutions.

Earth thought 202 of 365 : The further problem with environmental romanticism is its misapprehension of the hero. It thinks the lone individual or the commune are the purely good. But, ironically, the car-driving engineer who designs a more efficient car has done more good than the pure hermit. Millions of cars now produce less. This is like the case of Temple Grandin. She decided to work with the fast food industry, and as a result millions of cattle live in less fear and die a painless death. The people who know the changes are societal and can work them, finding the working benefit, not the denial -these are the heroines.

Earth thought 203 of 365 : And now a comment about environmental scholarship (rather than about Bastille Day -and why should we celebrate the beginning of a reign of beheadings?). Due to the organizational structure of academia, scholarship should be specialized, current and engaged with the known people in the field. Shouldn't I say, "due to the demands of scholarship"? After all, scholarship advances by focusing on divided labor, being specific, and moving as a dialogue among the positions on a question where it currently is. Maybe. This is a scientific model. But philosophy is not science. Philosophy, which cultivates wonder and educates the next generation's character, often calls for other things -for instance, for imagination, the ability to form character, and for historical depth. The best papers needn't always be the most trendy, and many debates grind nothing but dust -stepping back would help more. But there is this in philosophy, too -the important thing is the question, the problem, the idea. And these take clearing, and art. The great philosophers quite often write in ways that reflect it -think of Plato's dialogues, or Nietzsche's aphorisms, or Wittgenstein's remarks. And, interestingly, these outlive scholarship. Are more educational, more useful. Don't we need this now -as we engage with a problem unformulated for much of Western thought, the problem of the environment? But the organizational demands of peer review scholarship pressure us to the specialized, the current, the known. Such environmental scholarship, ironically, can put at risk environmental philosophy. And what environmentalist would want that?

Earth thought 204 of 365 : Now imagine ecotopia -what does it look like? When Plato conceived of the ideal city as an analogy for the ideally harmonious soul, he did not situate the soul it the outside, or the city in the country that surrounds it and keeps it situated. He didn't imagine the circulating air and running water, the seasons bearable for food and life. Then what city was it, what soul, there without breath, water, food or cool for sleep?

Earth thought 205 of 365 : The problem with Marxist analysis of private property is that it is not true enough to Marx's actual words. It generalizes easily to the claim "property is bad". But Marx was clear that property is not in-itself bad -rather, he objected to the effects of a form of property. He noticed -correctly- that private property in our world has no strings attached for the owner. There is no ethical tethering of the ownership in the community. If you own something, you can do with it what you will as long as you don't hurt others or their property. This is a shameless view of property. For what if what you wanted to do is to destroy your beautiful woodland for fun? Now, I do think liberty is crucial. And yet I do miss a community where how responsibly you own something in nature is tied to your status in the community.

Earth thought 206 of 365 : With some things we own, we feel that they are entrusted to us. Contemporary capitalist property rights can't explain how that could be part of ownership. After all, if something we own is entrusted to us, then we have responsibilities towards it -we can't just do with it what we will. At least not shamelessly. I am saying that how we own parts of the Earth ought often to be seen this way.

Earth thought 207 of 365 : The real ecological people act like this -it's natural, they express, to co-inhabit the Earth with other forms of life. You think that's ideological? The farmer plows around the Killdeer nest.

Earth thoughts 196-200

Earth thought 196 of 365:  This is apparently a cycle we might see with climate change - more heat in the winter, more cool in the summer.  I mean, the climate we will try to make in our homes and at work.  And the result?  More energy spent.  Here we see the vicious cycle.  If we do not find alternative energy to the kinds creating green house gases, then our attempt to ward off the effects of climate change will only exacerbate them.

Earth thought 197 of 365: I wonder, as might you, about this. The citizen expressing her or his concern for the environment is pressured to appeal to present interests if she or he wishes to get results. Our politics and media see barely beyond the present day. How, then, can she or he advocate for the unrecognized, the useless, or for the far future? I am wondering if there are interests that touch on us from each of these remote spots. Not present interests, deep interests.

Earth thought 198 of 365: Calm space in the world. We need it - like a clearing in the forest, or a still patch on the lake, gently rocking.

Earth thought 199 of 365 : Cool after heat -after hot, sticky, nerve-fraying heat. I come back, again and again, to the way we are so intimately connected in our sensibilities to the wider order, to climate. Disturbing, to find our autonomy so unhinged, by what? By temperature. Character worth its name, of course, resists it. But humanity acknowledges it.

Earth thought 200 of 365 : What is an environmental citizen? Clearly, the fisherwoman taking on British Petroleum. She wants to know how her environment will be affected, how its plenitude can be protected. She wants to know this -the air and water aren't abstract to her. They don't come through vents and show up in bottles. She has her life in them, like a handyman has his life in nails and screws that do not always work. Things can break down. You have to work at them; the body of our house isn't an idea.

192-195

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Earth thought 192 of 365: This is a photo of the dock at Crumhorn Mountain Boy Scout Camp, now called Camp Henderson, near Milford, N.Y. I was a waterfront instructor here in the summers of 1985 and 86. My sixth grade teacher Jim Davidson, who was waterfront director, got me involved. When I look at this photo, or -better- am by or on this lake, I feel a whole lesson rise up wordlessly. Character education is like that.

193 of 365: What can one learn from skipping stones? To pick the slight things and angle them well. Is there a lesson like a skipped stone?

Earth thought 194 of 365 : We cannot defer exhaustion. The problem is that we can defer exhausting behavior.

Earth thought 195 of 365 : Seeing British Petroleum's negligence pressured on by soft spots where no one will look and profits possible to squeeze out makes the case for coordinated, international environmental regulation all the clearer. Anything that can affect all of us negatively should be held to standard by all of us.

Earth thoughts 189-191

189 : Socrates says, in Plato's Republic, that it wasn't his task to show the ideal is possible. Indeed, even ideals are meaningful, just as a painting of an impossible perfection can be meaningful (I thought of Islamic arabesques, here). And yet we hear his critique of the opportunities of women, this first feminist critique of philosophy, and imagine how impossible it would have seemed for thousands of years in most parts of the world. Now, it isn't -thanks to the work and sacrifice of so many, especially women. So, environmentalists, should we be put off by the charge our ideals are impossible?

1 - 9 - 0 : Children imitate well the things their adults do. More so -they are consistent and precise in discovering where principles they've learned should be applied, but are not. It doesn't take more than a generation, then, to bring ourselves to a mentality of sustainability.

Earth thought 191 of 365: Environmental education -best done by example. Not experience alone, not the lone nature experience. Example -a person *relating* to nature in a way that honors and preserves it. Someone benevolent -of pure and good will. For it is our relationship that is at issue, that is skewed.

184-8

184 of 365 : I looked through my wild books yesterday -my drawing books from when I was young. How fascinating and fluid, the squirming, honest, determined grasp of life; pre-censored in many ways, pre-pre-professional. It makes me wonder about school. About motive. The distance between it and politics is most severe. Politics today is all censure. You can never be yourself, be messy, in front of people qua fellow citizens-to-be-persuaded. Makes me wonder about politics, then. The concept misses something. Our system does. And yet what would be fitting if not democracy? Yet this all goes to underline how impoverished our democracy is. How do *we* know what it is to be natural when our politics does not let us be natural?

185 / 365 : Tell me I'm not mad. Do I love flooring? Yes. It makes me appreciate many things: craft, solidity, what keeps the elements out, spring, wood, resources.

186 / 365 : Aging is an instructive process. I feel my metabolism changed. Suddenly (or so it seems), my vulnerability to disease, heart attacks, etc. comes to mind -not as likely- but as something possible. I am no longer immune like Spring (nor is Spring ever, but it is Spring to feel so, forever!).

Earth thought 187 of 365: In the beginning of Plato's Republic, Cephalus leads us to justice by explaining how old age makes the conscience more acute, provoking one to be just lest one be woken up at night in terror regarding one's prospects for the afterlife. It is a quaint hope, really a wish, that one would like to see in the world, even if the motive is self-interested (to avoid Hades). But the psychological claim is dubious. How many reach old age and soften conscience? "That was then." "Life is too short to fret." "I did the best I could." -- Conscience is, as Rousseau wrote, a weak voice, really. How much truer of ecological conscience. Which old age make one wake up in terror from that?

188 of 365 : The environment may be one place where , roughly speaking, virtue and happiness align. In this sense: if we have environmental virtue, we are more likely to preserve the environment and thereby safeguard our environmental health and our environment's meaning to us. In these ways, then, we are more likely to be happy. Environmental virtue is not sufficient for happiness, but conducive to it. And this is only roughly so -for the hurricane can still strike down the happiness of the sustainable community. Note, however, that virtue must be a feature of us, of the collective, to fulfill the link between it and happiness. The lone virtuous person, when it comes to the environment, is out of luck, for environmental problems -when caused by humans- are almost always collective problems, problems caused by many (think of toxicity; a lone polluter is not very dangerous). Individual virtue isn't consequential here, but virtue as a feature of our community (our ethos). My last question is to wonder whether social virtue is markedly different than environmental virtue just on the link to happiness. After all, the social justice activist is more likely to come up against oppression, all things considered. But the environmental conservationist is more likely to keep around health and beauty. Yet if we keep the same communal scope to virtue, this difference fades. The just "we" -the just community- is more likely to be happy. Isn't it?

181-3

181 of 365 :  Politics -the usual tone is aggressive.  From Thomas Hobbes to Simon Critchley, Marx to Cheney, anger is a core emotion.  Injustice cries out, outrages.  Selfishness generates fear -provides a securing backlash.  War is life.  But -and here I am out on a limb- although anger has its place (it most certainly does), I would like to make room for "melting".  Thoughtfulness softens people -not everyone, no, of course not, but many.  And how does it do that?  Here, politics, like the difference between professionalism and vocation, is more a poetic-human sensibility that keeps a familiar world close by, and rounds our edges like trips back to childhood (those lucky to have had good ones), to a place where hard defenses melt as maturity emerges in loose recognition of our tasks.  Environmentalists might consider some such tack.  Fear and anger are a hard habit.

182 of 365 (half way): Last night, I slept next to a pond with many bullfrogs around it.  We left the door open, and I heard them all night long.  I had dreams, many dreams, hopping about, energetic and calm at once.

183 / 365 :  What have I learned so far, doing this exercise?  That I like conforming myself to a meaning larger than my life, which is the condition on my life.  "Conforming" has bad connotations in our individualistic culture.  But it means, literally, forming-with.  It is relational forming, forming `a deux.

176-180

176 / 365: Philosophers talk of "events". Then, they turn to poetry and politics -and from there? Analogies to esoteric stuff, e.g., modes of presencing, forms of life, subjectivity, etc. I'm surprised they don't use more examples from ecology and biology, however. One look at the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, N.Y., and you know how random we are, we humans. And so for much of life, its contingent, surprising shapes. The processes may be law-governed, but the complexity from which, say, the Thylacine arose, is not. Why just *this* species? Maybe a niche called for it, but not in every single detail. It's an event. And so, too, with us, who happen to be an environmental fireball tearing through the Earth's systems of life in the geological flash of mere thousands of years.

177 / 365: The summer day says we should become a festival. But my heart is in my throat when I think about the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf, spreading throughout the sea. This one event shows us how our environment is finite, fragile at a certain point, how we can hurt the Earth. And what is "the Earth" such that it can be hurt? A person? An animal or plant? None of the above, but including all. It's a complex, interdependent system of systems that phase in and out with each other, causally interrelated. These systems are life and its conditions, and the Earth's the system of systems of life. Disrupt it significantly, and it unravels systems of life, hurting life across spectrums.

178 / 365 : Fixing the house -it does make you care for it. This is the insight pro-property environmentalists have. There's a difference, though, between a house and a resource. We live in our houses, those of us who own them. My hunch is that the living-in part accounts substantially for the caring part.

179 / 365: Before political directions are clear, developing culture is good politics. Environmental culture.

180 / 365 : Are there any ties between a picture of a world we can exploit and a society where people can fall through the cracks while the law and neighbors look the other way?

175

175 / 365: What is a merry-go-round? It's an invitation to let yourself roll round and round in wind for a short time. To be receptive. As Isaiah (5 yrs. old) says, "It makes you feel good." If I had to convince many people to care more about Earth, I might invite them on a merry-go-round first. Some arguments don't work until after the mind's open and perspective is relaxed.

174

174 / 365: Politics. We talk a lot in environmentalism of regulation. Top-down. Police the unrestrained hordes seduced by materialism. And so on. There is another kind of politics, though -the politics of fearless speech. Perhaps we can open up patterns by throwing everyday life out of joint. Anarchic theater, the ceremony of the dead, a pageant of extinct species, the Puppet Theater of Displaced Islanders, graffiti of the sunken planet, a neighborhood block party against hydro-fracking. Don't be immune to surprise -the T.V. isn't your eyes.

172-3

172 / 365: One of the big worries of environmentalism and environmental philosophy is: how can people be motivated to protect the environment? There's the assumption of a moral truth on one side and a motivational deficit on the other -truth in bed with apathy. But I believe people pursue what they see is in their interest, provided that "seeing" implies a close-up, deep look, not simply an intellectual conversation. My grounds for this are biological: all animals -even plants- reach out for what they take to be good. In Greek: oikeiosis. So the task of environmentalism should be to risk showing people our good up close -'risk', because maybe there is some anxiety that what environmentalism takes to be good really isn't when you look at it up close in the complex underbrush of life. Or maybe it's too frustrating to form relationships with people and communities, and to take the time to really show something that is good, so that people appreciate it up close. Still, if people really see something as good, they will begin to steer their lives toward it.

173 / 365: When, in the Gospel according to Matthew, Christ says that we should love our enemies and those who persecute or hate us, he uses the analogy of God raining on the good and the evil, shedding sunlight on the bad and the decent alike. In other words, Earth's biotic capacity is the model for unconditional love. Think about that.

170-1

170 / 365: "We, as gardeners, cultivate our land, our shelter[,] by taking care of the land for those to come after us - not being wasteful, but watchful - in what, how and why we care for our plot of land, whether we live in the country or [in] the city. We are 'gardeners', if we are aware to take care of the 'land', wherever we live." Aunt Evelyn Palik (née Bendik)

171/365: Raining in Bangladesh

Isaiah (age 5): "What's a fact?"

Jeremiah (age 40): "It's something absolutely true. Like, outside now it's sunny."

Isaiah: "Not in Bangladesh."

(Outside -taken literally, as outside the house. And including, logically, the whole world. Why not?)

166-169

[N.B., This post was originally published on 6.10.10. I then deleted it, thinking I would combine it with the post from 6.12.10. However, I realized that key to this exercise is fidelity to real time. So I have split off this post again, and it should be considered as something I felt to post on 6.10.10. Although some may have no meaning in the end, the rhythms of writing and posting, whether in stretches or in snippets, are important to this exercise of writing a remark about our relationship to Earth's ecology every day of this year.]


Earth thought 166 / 365: I'm repeatedly struck by how service to this nation-state -the U.S.A.- is best done through education. My nation's culture has become so inarticulate and given to junk-food desires. Kids have to be shown something constructive to want to continue it their whole lives long. Perhaps this is why the school-gardening movement seems so healthy to me. Better than World Wide "Wrestling" and McDonald's.

167 / 365: So the neo-conservatives are claiming that B.P.'s oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is a minor thing and that it's an excuse for environmentalists to spout off. Where are the reality checks of people who listen to this stuff? The tone of the speakers says, ironically, "don't be responsible", "look at me" -it's vain. Everyday intuitions tell me this, the same a jury would sense in earnestly trying to objectively read a witness. The intuitions come from facts -for instance, that these voices ignore the people and non-humans hurt by the spill or the sheer shock of seeing a coastline and waters become waste. There's nothing liberal or conservative about taking your fellow's hardship to heart. It's called old fashioned decency and humility. I don't know what's happened to my country sometimes. It's like everything real's become a T.V. show.

168 / 365: The child's face in light.

169 / 365: Garden. Is it ecological, the cultivating not being wild, being us? But why do you separate the human from the plant? Aren't we, in this patch, symbiotic?

Earth thoughts 161-165

Earth thought 161 of 365: It's hard to know what makes machines into elements, for they are so unlike elements. So let me pose things this-a-way. Why are machines so un-elemental? You say, "because they are made". But love is made, and it's elemental.

Earth thought 162 of 365: Deleuze & Guattari take Artaud and cry of a "body without organs". As Peter Hallward has shown, the desire -fantasy, really- in all this is for a pure nothingness of spontaneous ...? What? The problem is that even energy is organized, and so too is movement, and any *thing* in existence. This is why Deleuze & Guattari are fundamentally anti-ecological thinkers, contra Manuel Delanda. The ecological is deeply organized, and any becoming is toward an "organ", for that is how life is. Funny our culture, when its high counter-culture, supposedly self-critical, is more like a T.V. fantasy than the reality of life on Earth.

Earth thought 163 of 365: Recently, the Alaotra grebe of Madagascar was declared extinct -yet another bird species, an increasing number. The causes are clear again -the incursion of humans into habitats, invasive species. So much so that it's starting to look like "globalization" should be called, really, "mass extinction". That pretty much shows you bad anthropocentrism in a snapshot. From the perspective of most of life on this planet, we are a mass extinction. From our own, "we are the world".

Earth thought 164 of 365: An "ethos" is Greek for a way of life. Sometimes, the word's translated as character. It's the root of our word, "ethics". But, as you can see, a way of life has broader connotations than "ethics" does. I believe that the way to think of environmental ethics is through an environmental ethos. This includes more than right and wrong, good and bad. It includes a sensibility and the orientation of meaning that expresses a wise relationship to the Earth. It includes beauty and ugliness, too. For instance, ugliness isn't the ugly duckling -or insect. It's the yearning of intellectuals for an abstract and otherworldly avant-garde, a kind of Dorian Gray veneer of sophistication under the rhetoric of modernism, post-modernism, critical theory -while underneath they betray an ignorance of the only world we know, one which far exceeds -in all domains of value- our own little "world". The teeming life of the planet.

Earth thought 165 of 365: Human rights were ill-conceived from their foundation, abstracting man from his ecological conditions. It was suggested that the Bubble -the state- was everything, maker or breaker of destinies. But the Earth's the maker or breaker of states. We cannot develop indefinitely once the Earth has limits -human rights never truly began from them. And it's no use expecting technology to catch desire -that's like making a problem for someone to fix. No, rights need to be thought from the *ground* up, which is why environmental justice is key to an adequate conception of human rights. Only when human rights are a tissue of Earth norms will they make sense. I don't *simply* have the right to all manner of developmental goods -and limitless child-bearing- when having it will sacrifice future generations and countless species of life. So: what should human rights be to respect the plight of the global poor (who often need many children, and need basic goods) while blocking the un-ecological fantasy of the utopian Bubble? And why should rights even be drivers? They bypass the local and the constitutional, even. They tend to the simplistic. I know all this sounds like scary, hard objection, but the Earth's limits will be scarier, hard fact. Island nations are already sinking underwater because of our "rights".

Earth thoughts 156-160

Earth thought 156 of 365: There is nothing currently as vivid as the Gulf oil spill to show us our thoughtless economy. We have allowed a major corporation to destroy the Gulf's life-systems perhaps in perpetuity for generations. Can you wrap your head around that -all the fishermen, all the coastlines, the teeming ocean bottoms, the life that would migrate through, the breeding and hatching grounds, the birds depending on the ocean life -all of that? And now wrap your head around human culture, around the communities and visitors who depended on the teeming Gulf life, their rituals, sense of beauty, and their meaning?

Earth thought 157 of 365: The sixth mass extinction is not simply an extinction of life-forms, but also of forms of life. What's the difference? The former is a biological notion, a "life-form". The latter is a cultural form, "a form of life". Human cultures are woven around life forms -whether through hunting and fishing, agriculture, religious symbolism, literature, or even a sense of the world (what would upstate N.Y. be without four seasons?). And the ecological processes that drive life-forms extinct also drive forms of life extinct.

Earth thought 158 of 365: I saw a Western last night -1868. And also a film about Beijing now -2005. In those 137 years, we have found electricity, cars, airplanes, computers, and industrial processes about which I can only guess. Population has rocketed skyward on a chart. A species did all this in not even a century and a half, in five generations? It's almost unimaginable to put the world of the Western next to 21st century Beijing.

Earth thought 159 of 365: The Buddhists aspire to a world without anger. Anger's an affliction, a root and form of suffering. In its place, they put compassionate responsibility, the intention to free themselves and others from the cycle of suffering. If we became as Buddhists think, we would evolve beyond our animal order, beyond homo sapiens. We would self-evolve and regard what evolved in us as unworthwhile. We would seize our nature's contingency in a form of moral necessity.

Earth thought 160 of 365: People talk about environmental “aesthetics”. But aisthesis is passive, and the development of the aesthetic approach, concomitant with the creation of the word “aesthetics” in the 18th century, is equally passive –about how a subject views the world. I agree with Karsten Harries that this approach gradually desiccates art and its meaning. Instead, we should talk about an ecological ethos. An ethos is a way of life, in which things are meaningful. It is more than what we now call “ethics”. It includes beauty and truth, not just goodness. An ecological ethos is active, because it is a way of living, not simply a way of perceiving.

Earth thoughts 148-155

Earth thought 148 of 365: Inaccuracy hinders climate change debate to no small extent. The U.S. general public contains far too many who no longer know -or never learned- the scientific method and who are clueless about scientific peer review. They accept the ranting of both climate skeptics and climate apocalyptics without critical scrutiny. It is maddening, to try to debate with someone who thinks a scientific position is like an opinion or who thinks we've made no improvements in accuracy since we thought the Earth was flat and the Church suppressed science. Our educational systems are to blame, and a shameless media that drags its critical function low into "infotainment" (a word the formally displays the stupidity it denotes).

Earth thought 149 of 365: "Some things are better than others." Like health. It's better than sickness. But does health apply to ecological wholes -to ecosystems, bioregions, or the biosphere as a whole?

Earth thought 150 of 365: It is striking that mainstream, U.S. culture has no convention -like marriage, or swearing into office- by which a person commits her or himself to environmental stewardship. Do the mainstream religions have such a convention, or rite? How odd this vacuum of responsibility is, when you think about it.

Earth thought 151 of 365: Seeing cars backed up willy nilly on the interstate as they return from Chesapeake Bay. What's wrong with this picture? The absence of light rail.

Earth thought 152 of 365: Nature's pretty. Oh, we know. But the ugliness is just -even more- powerful. And what do you learn from it? And is it about you?

Earth thought 153 of 365: The "Anthropocene" -a proposed name for the geological era of homo sapiens. Eras usually span millions of years, and homo sapiens has yet to get anywhere near a million, much less a quarter of a million, or even a tenth? So what gives? Judged by our effect, though, we are a geological era in a sliver of time, like a meteor strike or a chain of volcanic eruptions. The Earth's become totally different after we struck. But an era? Perhaps not, perhaps we are more like an event, an eruption, a flash disturbance that opens some million on million year era we can hardly imagine, nor even name. I hope not, though. I hope we are in the anthropocene -for millions of years. First we were a spastic, wild event, changing everything. That took a mere 10,000 years, with most happening in a few hundred. Then, we got a grip of ourselves and became the first animals to tend to the biodiverse world, living with its wild life.

Earth thought 154 of 365: Hope is an important element of environmental activism -or at least it should be. I wish there were a name for the hope involved in claiming responsibility and acting on it -the hope that comes with agency. This isn't a hope that fantasizes a wish fulfilled, or covers one's world with sparkly treats. It is hardly dissociable from action, on the edge of the underside of action as you feel yourself effecting change -making what is a little bit into what should be, of setting the order straight. Kant called something like this hope a condition of action as such.

Earth thought 155 of 365: In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hanna Arendt proposed that evil in political-economies of scale, such as totalitarian ones, is “banal”, by which she meant a result not of diabolical intentions but of organized thoughtlessness. Robert Jackall’s Moral Mazes shows how banal irresponsibility with massive effects really is. Consider –the Gulf Oil spill currently risking the long-term destruction of the Gulf of Mexico’s life-systems appears to have been a result of organized corporate irresponsibility.

Earth thoughts 139-147

Earth thought 139 of 365: In the drama of most people's lives -for instance, the South Asian worker on the lift for the sixth straight day of work at 10-12 hours joining bolts to girders in Dubai- I just cannot fault our blindness to the environment. And often people outside the five star hotels like this, people know that we are wasting the planet. But it is powerlessness, a lack of political access that shuts the way. Then education happens -some are lifted up, up the economic gridwork of our world. And? Why do we forget? In the place of our former awareness comes a search for status and money. The missing link, education, has misled us. They went in paying large amounts to earn a better job. It was all about jobs, and -rubbing shoulders with their competing classmates- they emerged full blind to our wasteful life. Education, sadly, is the anti-ecological thing for many, blocking the way to politics by changing the focus of our minds. Then, the uneducated often know better, but lack the education to know how to better. And the educated, near to power, know worse.

Earth thought 140 of 365: I watched French cinema last week -Bob le Flambeur, Cours Toujours, Carnages- three very different films made decades apart from each other. Then, I realized that they all showed a keen awareness of chance, or luck, and of the way it intertwines us in happenings. Such a sensibility, I think, is key to grasping evolutionary life, is -you might say- a basic ecological sensibility.

Earth thought 141 of 365: End of semester grading, with its misshapen papers, academic dishonesty, appeals, emails, phone calls, running out pens, sore necks, weak eyes, lack of exercise, distraught students, angry messages, fine-grain policy, stress, and deadlines -is as messy as carnivores hunting on the savannah. Carnage!

Earth thought 142 of 365: "Let me shower, meditate, and get on with my day." Once again, like weather.

Earth thought 143 of 365: When's a home overlapping like an ecosystem? -When the papers lie on top of papers here, clothes hung there, a chair shifted to fit, and the fine sift of dust shades a corner. When it's lived in.

Earth thought 144 of 365: What is an ecological school? It is a school where the outside is in the inside, and where school time rests -self-aware- in seasonal and then geological time. Students must live with rock patterns in their hearts, and with the rise and fall of species. The school's design, too, is inside out -students and teachers alike confront the energy patterns and production histories, the choices made and missed of a purely recycle-able structure, roof to ground to power-lines to cups in the kitchen. An ecological school, in other words, is that first by the manner of its organization and the being of its materials -how its life itself is made self-aware of its indebtedness to the wider order.

Earth thought 145 of 365: I cannot imagine the aesthetics of loss that the sixth mass extinction deserves. I imagine a museum of foregone life, but it is just a museum of natural history. So, what, then? A day out of every school year, like Earth day? More tokenism, and then we return to exploitation. Perhaps the best way to evoke loss is to work on preserving life at risk of extinction. Then the struggle becomes clear, the complication, dense matter, difficult politics.

Earth thought 146 of 365: There is utopia in a million year old form of life. Look at it, how it has weathered and been weathered.

Earth thought 147 of 365: A religious person would say we have responsibility *to*, not *for*, Creation. There's a lot packed into a preposition.