Saturday, October 2, 2010
Second generation climate ethics
Two eight three. Now second generation time. First generation climate ethics focused on whether there is a climate problem, what caused it, who is responsible, and how to apportion blame. Now second generation time. It focuses on the full extent of the problem as a problem for the adaptability of our form of life -our social and political systems, our values, our habits, our technology and economics- to a new world climate. It focuses on responsibility in its many forms and extents working this adaptation and restraining foregone climate change from the worst effects on the future. Retrospective blame game is out: are-you-doing-anything-now?! is in. Maybe-it's-not-happening is out; use-your-imagination abides.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Two eight one - eight two
281. After writing a memo about "21st century universities" yesterday afternoon, I woke up early this morning to realize that the time frame of 21 centuries sits as a convention, a bubble, in my mind. Geological time is my new default context. I position recorded human history as a sliver of 10,000 years in a 50,000 year shard, silently our species emerging from within a pack of similar hominids... . Then that shard falls from, and can be replaced back into, a chunk of time of mammalian evolution after the fifth mass extinction 65 million years ago. And so on. A great energy flux, a weathered wash of life..., this is my default perspective! Ten years ago, it was not; then, I felt the millennium as a giant surrounding wave... . I like it. The Museum of the Earth has affected my imagination. My habitual imaginary is post-Christian, temporally speaking.
282. Ode to a global flow. The cotton from [?], dyes from [?], buttons from [?] made from plastics from [?] -all stitched into Zara's Spring line outside Dhaka, Bangladesh; shipped to Spain [?] and redistributed to Dubai where's its sold in Mall of the Emirates to a U.S. woman who travels back to New York, then to Cleveland, and lives in Shaker Square, wearing the suit downtown on the commuter rail and walking around Public Square into her office building, up to the 27th floor, corner office, overlooking Lake Erie. Peak oil hits -oil prices skyrocket. It's too expensive to ship and fly. Reused fabric from Bratenahl, Ohio; stitched in Lakewood, Ohio; sold in Tremont, Ohio; worn in downtown Cleveland. Will peak-oil shrink wrap the globe? Will global warming? No, because each will tear the shrink wrap open, gaping holes now for the globe to breathe as we retract our frenetic activity out of necessity. Who knows? This is just speculation. Will we adapt ourselves to new flows: river-ways, sail routes, corridors without incessant storms? Will we avoid some, too -salt water flows edging inland, pouring into dips and vallies; flows of mosquitoes and Mayflies clogging the air, plumes of heated air so hot they scorch the lungs?
282. Ode to a global flow. The cotton from [?], dyes from [?], buttons from [?] made from plastics from [?] -all stitched into Zara's Spring line outside Dhaka, Bangladesh; shipped to Spain [?] and redistributed to Dubai where's its sold in Mall of the Emirates to a U.S. woman who travels back to New York, then to Cleveland, and lives in Shaker Square, wearing the suit downtown on the commuter rail and walking around Public Square into her office building, up to the 27th floor, corner office, overlooking Lake Erie. Peak oil hits -oil prices skyrocket. It's too expensive to ship and fly. Reused fabric from Bratenahl, Ohio; stitched in Lakewood, Ohio; sold in Tremont, Ohio; worn in downtown Cleveland. Will peak-oil shrink wrap the globe? Will global warming? No, because each will tear the shrink wrap open, gaping holes now for the globe to breathe as we retract our frenetic activity out of necessity. Who knows? This is just speculation. Will we adapt ourselves to new flows: river-ways, sail routes, corridors without incessant storms? Will we avoid some, too -salt water flows edging inland, pouring into dips and vallies; flows of mosquitoes and Mayflies clogging the air, plumes of heated air so hot they scorch the lungs?
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
280. Presentism
280. Is this worse than being a racist or a sexist -being a presentist? A presentist? A presentist is someone who favors the present generation at the expense of those to come. Presentism's prejudice for the present, to the detriment of the future. Worse than racism? Well, it exacerbates racism. The shortage of future resources or of good conditions only allows racial bias to more drastically afflict the oppressed. There is a well-documented literature on the racial dimension of environmental injustice already. But worse than sexism? The same reasoning would apply, I think. It is, for example, the women who search for water all day in most subsistence parts of the world, many of which are about to have even less water. Or consider the Missing Woman Figure: with dwindling resources, it is the woman child who will increasingly be abandoned in sexist cultures that abandon female children or malnourish them. I feel like saying, with only the inaccuracy of a metaphor more true than false, that presentists put hundreds of millions on the slave block, right now -shackling future children in oppressive, hot, resource depleted conditions, the slaves to appetite, political instability, and what I called yesterday Global Hurting. Presentism's simply more massive, sweeping and pervasive than either racism or sexism -or is it? We presentists drive our SUVs, let our President avoid a climate treaty, fly our planes to conferences willy nilly. We aren't bad people -our whole society is presentist. It's all we know, like the racist and sexist societies of the past (and still today) which are blind to their assumptions. "Oh, the future of humankind doesn't count as much as us! Not those kids!"
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
279. The Failure (1988-2012)
279. I want a climate movie, a good one, seen from the perspective of a climate refugee in 2050. It should include the retrospective, blanket condemnation of politicians and their oil company, mass utilities, agribusiness backers. It should depict the history of the Failure (1988-2012) when everyone in the know knew about climate change -the politicians, the journalists, the academics- and (most) sneezed, looked the other way, accepted corporate backing, feigned skepticism, and pleaded being busy. The Failure should be part of every child's vocabulary. And instead of the term "Global Weirding", which sounds like all we have to do is fend off Halloween on more days than once a year, the term would be "Global Hurting" -for none of the life on this planet evolved to handle what we've managed to create, including ourselves. The movie would show the kids of Generation Hot (Hertsgaard's apt term) and convey messages of the elderly dying of heatstroke in the tens of thousands, of children sick from saline water and fresh water shortages near shores encroaching inland from sea level rise, and of a duller colored planet -a planet without coral reefs and with extinctions as common as leaves crunching underfoot in Autumn. The Rockies will be barren in this film, eaten out by beetle infestations and then washed out by soil erosion. And many states will have imploded as Sudan has under the pressure of desertification. In this 2050 world, the refugee will rely on the kindness of strangers, which is real. New, globally integrated political forms will have sprung up to help out, but everyone will be stressed and angry at the stupidity and daft selfishness, the utter human tragedy which is us, now -- people of the Failure.
Monday, September 27, 2010
271-8. (Fragments - Adaptation)
271. (Fragments) In German romanticism -circa 1830- and later in avant garde modernism -circa 1925- and later still in modern music -circa 1950- and in many other spots and places inclusive even of hip-hop, rap, and all sorts of late 20th century media and performance art, the fragment form released us from pretense so that we could get a grip. On our limits. The fragment form proceeds from a relinquished pretense. You can't master, or even comprehend, "all that" (whatever the pretense is). "You can't claim the wholeness of history." "You can't be as complete as you felt in the womb." "You can't know the answer to all your why's". And now: "We can't live in globalization's fantasy of endless up-scaled, economic growth." And the fragment's quite real here, the cracks showing: climate change is bringing down the fragile glass room where we thought we could be angels. The hot, dusty, humid, pouring, freezing, billowing sky is pouring in. Chunks on the floor by your feet. Your children have already decided on the basement.
272. It seems strange to focus on personal health as anything more than an instrumental goal, keeping us alive and kicking to deal with heady things of a global nature. But personal health can be seen as intrinsically good, in so far as being in it just is good, that is, just is a facet of eudaimonia, which is not beyond it but is expressed by it. There is another way it is "in-itself", too. It is a microcosm, analogically related to the wider order. When I am healthy, I am in my own ecosystem well, fitting my limits, not overdoing it. I am not running myself down. Energy is a surplus, not a deficit. I don't take in more than I use. I am weathered into myself in a vital way. If only this could be said for our civilization, even our cities, even our restaurants and homes.
273. As Roger Saillant points out, the environmental crisis we now face is not one we can avert in our lifetimes; it is one we can start to turn around for future generations. The atmosphere's cooked for a thousand years. But we can see humanity through the eye of the needle -la porte e'troite- by getting our system more, and more sustainable. I mean, ecologically. What also we can do is to reduce how horrendous our affects are. The more we slow down climate change, mass extinction, and other environmental wantonness, the better it'll be for folks a hundred years from now. We can avert an even worse fate than the bad one we -and mostly those who came before us- have caused. So, we're talking long range dedication, and not self-interest. The kind of thing you get when you put your ego aside and realize you'll be dead one day. And how has your life chalked up? (Or that you get when you realize how lovely the world is, and what have you done to protect that?)
274. At the precise historical moment when we need to expand our sense of ecology to include the planet, we are also driven to focus our sense of ecology down to the scale of genetics, there in the inside of cells. Is this more doable? Less? Distracting? Complementary? It seems an extra stretch that is challenging.
275. Pornography and environmentalism. Not a common match. There are those who use the term "nature porn", where what they mean is artificially idealized shots of nature evoking a fantasy. It's a stretch. Because the exploitation's left out. I see nothing wrong with erotica, but pornography typically conveys a strong message degrading women. (There are other subjects of pornography, of course.) And this is not to investigate the conditions under which porn's made, which are often very exploitative. I'm talking instead just about the message. Is the domination of women ideologically related to the domination of nature? Eco-feminists say so, and sometimes rightly. When someone uses rape imagery to describe technological power over nature (as, apparently, can be found in Bacon's early empirical science).... But I think the link is more subtle for the most part. Porn reduces intimacy to juice. It converts relational reality to mechanical potency with hedonistic intent. So with our consumption of nature at large. Our entire society's based off of recurring reductions of the relational reality of nature, of our possible closeness with it and of its ability to coax us to self-understanding. We tolerate reducing nature to a resource for our largely hedonistic aims, hide it, and then make a big deal of our romance for nature in specific, contained places -the parks and poems. We're like spouses with our action on the side. But come on! Women are special: they give birth to all of us. Nature does, too, in a figurative sense. There is a very real way in which the woman being exploited in the porn image is some (potential) child's (potential) mother. And how would the child feel about that? Is this how we treat our mothers? Could we take this response analogically to nature? Why don't we? (Consider, by contrast, if instead of porn there were some beautiful form of erotica, art that deepens our understanding of intimacy or of bodily closeness. Would even the child be embarrassed once adult? Perhaps a sailboat is the erotica; mining, the porn.)
276. I like to glide when I ride. And that means this: slowing up hills, quickening down them. The gas-users of America act as if we have no topography!!
277. With our government failing to recreate the Kyoto Protocol, which it never really supported, and with no substitute climate treatise being made (isn't that unbelievable at this critical juncture in history?), what on Earth should we demand of it? To stop subsidizing the big energy conglomerates, the mass utilities? To provide incentives for the development of a viable solar or wind market? To teach energy conservation on national media and to give incentives for doing it? Why not fund a corp of mechanic-teachers who give free efficiency classes in each community, teaching people how to retrofit their homes to save money, and teaching other ideas -related to transportation and purchasing- at the same time? Is it true that U.S. citizens could save up to 40% energy use merely through efficiency? But the problem is everywhere the same: lobbyists have captured my government, both the legislative and executive branches. And so, the first action item should be the bill -sometimes discussed- that bans lobbyists from Federal politics, or at least reduces their contributions to those normal citizens could make. It is to reform the election system in kind, making campaigning outlays accessible to a well-organized everyday mensch; it's to let democracy work.
278. It's time for universities to fund research and programming on adaptation to climate change. The old image of sustainability as an ever overturning way of life is false, because the changing climate will change what is possible in life -all the way through our social and political systems, too. To square up with the values of sustainability and future realities concerning them, we need to focus on adaptation. "New planets need new habits." New political forms, too.
272. It seems strange to focus on personal health as anything more than an instrumental goal, keeping us alive and kicking to deal with heady things of a global nature. But personal health can be seen as intrinsically good, in so far as being in it just is good, that is, just is a facet of eudaimonia, which is not beyond it but is expressed by it. There is another way it is "in-itself", too. It is a microcosm, analogically related to the wider order. When I am healthy, I am in my own ecosystem well, fitting my limits, not overdoing it. I am not running myself down. Energy is a surplus, not a deficit. I don't take in more than I use. I am weathered into myself in a vital way. If only this could be said for our civilization, even our cities, even our restaurants and homes.
273. As Roger Saillant points out, the environmental crisis we now face is not one we can avert in our lifetimes; it is one we can start to turn around for future generations. The atmosphere's cooked for a thousand years. But we can see humanity through the eye of the needle -la porte e'troite- by getting our system more, and more sustainable. I mean, ecologically. What also we can do is to reduce how horrendous our affects are. The more we slow down climate change, mass extinction, and other environmental wantonness, the better it'll be for folks a hundred years from now. We can avert an even worse fate than the bad one we -and mostly those who came before us- have caused. So, we're talking long range dedication, and not self-interest. The kind of thing you get when you put your ego aside and realize you'll be dead one day. And how has your life chalked up? (Or that you get when you realize how lovely the world is, and what have you done to protect that?)
274. At the precise historical moment when we need to expand our sense of ecology to include the planet, we are also driven to focus our sense of ecology down to the scale of genetics, there in the inside of cells. Is this more doable? Less? Distracting? Complementary? It seems an extra stretch that is challenging.
275. Pornography and environmentalism. Not a common match. There are those who use the term "nature porn", where what they mean is artificially idealized shots of nature evoking a fantasy. It's a stretch. Because the exploitation's left out. I see nothing wrong with erotica, but pornography typically conveys a strong message degrading women. (There are other subjects of pornography, of course.) And this is not to investigate the conditions under which porn's made, which are often very exploitative. I'm talking instead just about the message. Is the domination of women ideologically related to the domination of nature? Eco-feminists say so, and sometimes rightly. When someone uses rape imagery to describe technological power over nature (as, apparently, can be found in Bacon's early empirical science).... But I think the link is more subtle for the most part. Porn reduces intimacy to juice. It converts relational reality to mechanical potency with hedonistic intent. So with our consumption of nature at large. Our entire society's based off of recurring reductions of the relational reality of nature, of our possible closeness with it and of its ability to coax us to self-understanding. We tolerate reducing nature to a resource for our largely hedonistic aims, hide it, and then make a big deal of our romance for nature in specific, contained places -the parks and poems. We're like spouses with our action on the side. But come on! Women are special: they give birth to all of us. Nature does, too, in a figurative sense. There is a very real way in which the woman being exploited in the porn image is some (potential) child's (potential) mother. And how would the child feel about that? Is this how we treat our mothers? Could we take this response analogically to nature? Why don't we? (Consider, by contrast, if instead of porn there were some beautiful form of erotica, art that deepens our understanding of intimacy or of bodily closeness. Would even the child be embarrassed once adult? Perhaps a sailboat is the erotica; mining, the porn.)
276. I like to glide when I ride. And that means this: slowing up hills, quickening down them. The gas-users of America act as if we have no topography!!
277. With our government failing to recreate the Kyoto Protocol, which it never really supported, and with no substitute climate treatise being made (isn't that unbelievable at this critical juncture in history?), what on Earth should we demand of it? To stop subsidizing the big energy conglomerates, the mass utilities? To provide incentives for the development of a viable solar or wind market? To teach energy conservation on national media and to give incentives for doing it? Why not fund a corp of mechanic-teachers who give free efficiency classes in each community, teaching people how to retrofit their homes to save money, and teaching other ideas -related to transportation and purchasing- at the same time? Is it true that U.S. citizens could save up to 40% energy use merely through efficiency? But the problem is everywhere the same: lobbyists have captured my government, both the legislative and executive branches. And so, the first action item should be the bill -sometimes discussed- that bans lobbyists from Federal politics, or at least reduces their contributions to those normal citizens could make. It is to reform the election system in kind, making campaigning outlays accessible to a well-organized everyday mensch; it's to let democracy work.
278. It's time for universities to fund research and programming on adaptation to climate change. The old image of sustainability as an ever overturning way of life is false, because the changing climate will change what is possible in life -all the way through our social and political systems, too. To square up with the values of sustainability and future realities concerning them, we need to focus on adaptation. "New planets need new habits." New political forms, too.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
270 (particularity)
270. Backbone -that trite word. Where does it come from? For me, from loved ones -- their voices, their faces. (Elaine's voice, Isaiah's face, mom and dad and Ruth's voices, seeing the aunts... Recalling times with my good friends.). From particularities of a relational, personal kind, see. And why "backbone"? Because purpose. Because responsibility ... to them. ... I think of this as my emotions are flung all over the place by Bill McKibben's latest book -so dire, I had not yet read anything so dire. But the disaster books don't do a good job of starting us from particularity, and so they promote some hysteria that shouldn't be there, I mean, not if we're going to be responsible. That's the thing that's going to keep me going when the economy goes mad from climate change disasters and oil market collapse -a voice, a face. Don't laugh. Or, do. I'll remember you and why life's worth living when your face breaks into joy.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
269
269. The question is not what can you do for me, or who am I in this world, but what can I do for you?
Friday, September 17, 2010
264-8 (fun)
264 of 365: McKibben tells us that we must get used to "Eaarth" -two "a"s. That's the planet we've shifted into being from global warming, unlike any planet our evolution and recorded history have known. An alien planet, to us, full of global weirding, tragedy, loss, heat and dryness and dust and rain and floods. But here I disagree with him. It's still Earth, a continuous biochemical system, our origin and home. And we would do better to relate to it as the same planet in a shifted sense(lessness). There's the loss -the reality that'll harsh us. This is Earth, still Earth, and we have pushed it until it ravages us.
Earth thought 265 of 365 (a hundred more to go!): Once one realizes (a) the magnitude of global environmental problems, (b) their need for persistent and long-term response, and (c) their complexity, not least to evaluation, it is understandable to wonder whether it wouldn't be better to push for an authoritarian answer. After all, democratic states exist currently in a dis-integrated global patchwork with many holes of sovereignty and failed coordination. State alongside state alongside state with no clear environmental consistency in-between. And then the whims and winds of democratic preference, opting for short-term interests. The wide-spread ignorance and apparent hedonism -valuing material pleasures over invisible values such as biodiversity or the imagined well-being of generations a hundred years from now. (This hedonism perhaps more a result of deft corporate advertising and lobbying, but then the problem of each of those.) It is enough to make one reach for one's Philosopher-King (and cock it). But whereas a globally integrated normative order is needed as a goal, authoritarianism seems unjustifiable even on consequential grounds. For it does not avoid the dangers of epistemological blindness, value over-selectivity, and lack of motivational authority. Not to mention corruption. It can be blind to its perspective, overly focused on the things it thinks matter, and abstract to the real concerns of people -indeed, it would almost certainly be, if global. More importantly, it is notoriously susceptible to corruption, whereas checks and balances are less so. What is needed is a dispersed and widely held method for stabilizing perspective and integrating invisible values. And the wide hold will bring motivational authority. What is needed are checks on the systemic soft-spots that currently give lobbyists and the media such inordinate power to sway actual politics away from actual public opinion (which is, actually, greener than you might think!).
266. Lady Gaga's meat. Her raw beef. I'm talking about the dress she wore to the MTV award ceremony on the 12th -a dress made of raw meat. Ha ha. You get the joke. Now, the question is, is her behavior any worse than the typical American diet of meat 2 to 3 times a day, 5 to 7 days a week? (I am guestimating, anecdotally.) Is it more flagrant, more gluttonous than the typical diner or restaurant menu? Sure, the eaters eat the meat -but certainly not for nutrition, as so much meat is unnecessary and often bad for people. And, on Gaga's side, she is doing something creative, whereas the meat eaters are just suctioning in sausages, burgers, steaks, chicken on chicken processed dish, pork on pork hotdogs, ham sandwiches, you name it. And the eaters have made the kill invisible, whereas she made it visible.
267. The other day, during a sustainability workforce, I found myself reacting with momentary surprise at the realization that what is ecological is also economical. So seldom do you hear that kind of talk. It was like a voice from my culture of expansive and compulsive "growth" was saying, "You can save energy, save the planet, and save money -who would have thought?!" Here, I glimpsed the abstraction Marx analyzed so well in his explanation of capitalist value. I had fallen into a frame of mind that forgets how the economic circulates goods drawn from and embedded in Earth's ecology, like it or not. Goods come from somewhere, consumption consumes, and even the abstract value in a Versace scarf still depends on the silk, dyes, and production energy that fabricated it, the transportation (pollution), the packaging, the physical world! But of course economy rests on ecology at some point -of course!
268. (In honor of Breena Holland, who will be publishing a good book.) What is the source of all our fun? The environment. Without it, we wouldn't even live. "Hey! You, idiot! You're destroying all our fun!"
Earth thought 265 of 365 (a hundred more to go!): Once one realizes (a) the magnitude of global environmental problems, (b) their need for persistent and long-term response, and (c) their complexity, not least to evaluation, it is understandable to wonder whether it wouldn't be better to push for an authoritarian answer. After all, democratic states exist currently in a dis-integrated global patchwork with many holes of sovereignty and failed coordination. State alongside state alongside state with no clear environmental consistency in-between. And then the whims and winds of democratic preference, opting for short-term interests. The wide-spread ignorance and apparent hedonism -valuing material pleasures over invisible values such as biodiversity or the imagined well-being of generations a hundred years from now. (This hedonism perhaps more a result of deft corporate advertising and lobbying, but then the problem of each of those.) It is enough to make one reach for one's Philosopher-King (and cock it). But whereas a globally integrated normative order is needed as a goal, authoritarianism seems unjustifiable even on consequential grounds. For it does not avoid the dangers of epistemological blindness, value over-selectivity, and lack of motivational authority. Not to mention corruption. It can be blind to its perspective, overly focused on the things it thinks matter, and abstract to the real concerns of people -indeed, it would almost certainly be, if global. More importantly, it is notoriously susceptible to corruption, whereas checks and balances are less so. What is needed is a dispersed and widely held method for stabilizing perspective and integrating invisible values. And the wide hold will bring motivational authority. What is needed are checks on the systemic soft-spots that currently give lobbyists and the media such inordinate power to sway actual politics away from actual public opinion (which is, actually, greener than you might think!).
266. Lady Gaga's meat. Her raw beef. I'm talking about the dress she wore to the MTV award ceremony on the 12th -a dress made of raw meat. Ha ha. You get the joke. Now, the question is, is her behavior any worse than the typical American diet of meat 2 to 3 times a day, 5 to 7 days a week? (I am guestimating, anecdotally.) Is it more flagrant, more gluttonous than the typical diner or restaurant menu? Sure, the eaters eat the meat -but certainly not for nutrition, as so much meat is unnecessary and often bad for people. And, on Gaga's side, she is doing something creative, whereas the meat eaters are just suctioning in sausages, burgers, steaks, chicken on chicken processed dish, pork on pork hotdogs, ham sandwiches, you name it. And the eaters have made the kill invisible, whereas she made it visible.
267. The other day, during a sustainability workforce, I found myself reacting with momentary surprise at the realization that what is ecological is also economical. So seldom do you hear that kind of talk. It was like a voice from my culture of expansive and compulsive "growth" was saying, "You can save energy, save the planet, and save money -who would have thought?!" Here, I glimpsed the abstraction Marx analyzed so well in his explanation of capitalist value. I had fallen into a frame of mind that forgets how the economic circulates goods drawn from and embedded in Earth's ecology, like it or not. Goods come from somewhere, consumption consumes, and even the abstract value in a Versace scarf still depends on the silk, dyes, and production energy that fabricated it, the transportation (pollution), the packaging, the physical world! But of course economy rests on ecology at some point -of course!
268. (In honor of Breena Holland, who will be publishing a good book.) What is the source of all our fun? The environment. Without it, we wouldn't even live. "Hey! You, idiot! You're destroying all our fun!"
Sunday, September 12, 2010
263 (Reverence)
263: Turning McKibben and Lovelock around -the twin comfort destroyers (and they should be) - there's this. To keep our quality of life, our essential humanity, we'll need to find goodness in our world. Pace Cormack McCarthy. And one form of approaching this is simple faith -what Allen Thompson, borrowing from Jonathan Lear, calls "'radical hope' for living well in a warmer world". Well, why not? It is better than hysteria. Another form of approaching goodness in a planet shaken by drought, desertification, dust storms, extreme weather events, starving refugees, resource wars, and flooded coastal cities is to rediscover humbling appreciation for Earth, for what it gave us, and still does, and for what it could begin to give us -somewhat- again should we nurture it. Call that "reverence". I wonder whether the death blow dealt our hubris by climate change will awaken reverence. Well it should -instead of hysterical fundamentalisms.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
262
262: From Bill McKibben's Eaarth (2010) (sic., deliberate) on climate change's floods -
"We can't simply keep stacking boulders against the change that's coming on every front; we'll need to figure out what parts of our lives and our ideologies we must abandon so that we can protect the core of our societies and civilizations."
That is, we need to change our sense of what to expect of human life, of what is desirable, and of what is virtuous. This is what Allen Thompson and I call "the humanist view of adaptation" -and it is a far cry from what the President is considering, for whom adaptation is a matter of -futilely- throwing technology and money at a world whose values do not need -he thinks- to change!
"We can't simply keep stacking boulders against the change that's coming on every front; we'll need to figure out what parts of our lives and our ideologies we must abandon so that we can protect the core of our societies and civilizations."
That is, we need to change our sense of what to expect of human life, of what is desirable, and of what is virtuous. This is what Allen Thompson and I call "the humanist view of adaptation" -and it is a far cry from what the President is considering, for whom adaptation is a matter of -futilely- throwing technology and money at a world whose values do not need -he thinks- to change!
Friday, September 10, 2010
257-261 (Justice erupts in.)
257 of 365: It's good to keep a 20-something attitude toward what can happen. There's chance in the air. Can't we try this out? We might know it -all we do is only a sliver of necessity. We emerged out of oblivion inside the make-shift habits of adults. And we're only a step along the way. The future world is unimaginable. So go headlong into it, innovating. You might even innovate a challenge that engenders thoughtfulness.
258 : (Justification) I believe that the sixth mass extinction is something we ought to address. Why? Our behavior is wanton. Why is that bad? Humans shouldn't waste life thoughtlessly. Why not? Life is amazing. Why? Because it is. (Not a justification)
Earth thought 259 of 365: People who want to think about environmental change should think first about trust. Trust, after all, is a keeper when change would otherwise tear open people's anxiety. Trust is the alchemist of anxiety. It turns the anxious into surprise. And surprised by a redesigned, revalued civilization -that would be nice, wouldn't it? So get to know people first, be trustworthy, you activists of the next, future world!
Earth thought 260 of 365: As Chin-Tai Kim reminds me, trust worthiness is a different thing than being trusted -and how true this is! The demagogue is trusted without being worthy of it -cajoling the people while misleading us. Ideally, we would trust only what is trust worthy, and someone seeking trust would do so on the basis of seeking the worthiness to be trusted. But there are short-cuts. And human error. There are failures of will and failures of judgment, and the two may inter-penetrate each other. A complex soup. And can the environmentalist seeking social change learn from it? But isn't the advice the same as before -to develop knowledge, if we can, and to set our hearts and our habits on the good? For who would be trust-worthy, especially in matters of guidance, who did not know where we should go and who did not use her knowledge to good ends? Only the holy idiot, whose heart and intuition accustom us to ignorance. These and more proliferating considerations face the environmentalist who would be less than a caricature and more than a demagogue.
Earth thought 261 of 365: History of the World 101: Some portions of the world, around 1500 A.D. managed to brutally exploit the rest of the world, using that exploitation to drastically increase material development back home. 500 years later, those same parts of the world managed to make the descendants of the exploited suffer even more. And they did so quite simply, by polluting. Climate change floods the helpless, not the gluttonous rich, and colonialism's shadow stretches over the poorest faces still. Is it not enough to make you shake your fists at the sky?
258 : (Justification) I believe that the sixth mass extinction is something we ought to address. Why? Our behavior is wanton. Why is that bad? Humans shouldn't waste life thoughtlessly. Why not? Life is amazing. Why? Because it is. (Not a justification)
Earth thought 259 of 365: People who want to think about environmental change should think first about trust. Trust, after all, is a keeper when change would otherwise tear open people's anxiety. Trust is the alchemist of anxiety. It turns the anxious into surprise. And surprised by a redesigned, revalued civilization -that would be nice, wouldn't it? So get to know people first, be trustworthy, you activists of the next, future world!
Earth thought 260 of 365: As Chin-Tai Kim reminds me, trust worthiness is a different thing than being trusted -and how true this is! The demagogue is trusted without being worthy of it -cajoling the people while misleading us. Ideally, we would trust only what is trust worthy, and someone seeking trust would do so on the basis of seeking the worthiness to be trusted. But there are short-cuts. And human error. There are failures of will and failures of judgment, and the two may inter-penetrate each other. A complex soup. And can the environmentalist seeking social change learn from it? But isn't the advice the same as before -to develop knowledge, if we can, and to set our hearts and our habits on the good? For who would be trust-worthy, especially in matters of guidance, who did not know where we should go and who did not use her knowledge to good ends? Only the holy idiot, whose heart and intuition accustom us to ignorance. These and more proliferating considerations face the environmentalist who would be less than a caricature and more than a demagogue.
Earth thought 261 of 365: History of the World 101: Some portions of the world, around 1500 A.D. managed to brutally exploit the rest of the world, using that exploitation to drastically increase material development back home. 500 years later, those same parts of the world managed to make the descendants of the exploited suffer even more. And they did so quite simply, by polluting. Climate change floods the helpless, not the gluttonous rich, and colonialism's shadow stretches over the poorest faces still. Is it not enough to make you shake your fists at the sky?
Sunday, September 5, 2010
250-256
Earth thought 250 of 365 : Gandhi reportedly said that he had thought God is truth, but then realized that truth is god. I wonder how he would feel now, facing the environmental crises of this century. Which shibboleths would he challenge? I believe he would challenge at least two -the national border and the corporate ownership of Earth. He would challenge the former, because national borders keep us from protecting all humans and most creatures from the pollution some of us cause. He would challenge the latter, because hunger and thirst are bound to be a blight in this century as climate change progresses, and yet agriculture and water are becoming commodified by massive transnational corporations that hold the reigns on each to a large extent. But then, think how the first of these challenges would change the Gandhi we know from history -Gandhi the nationalist. He'd have now to become a cosmopolitan of sorts, a citizen of Earth.
Earth thought 251 of 365 : I've been having flashes recently of ... I don't know the word to describe it. I suddenly *realize* -the intuition, not just concept is there- that everything I or others do on this planet is here today, gone tomorrow -that the entire history of life is a point, gone, and with no one to record or watch it, or with no way to make sense of what it would be to record or watch it. It's just gone. This means that by gone-s are just that -in history, and also in my life. There is a speed under all this, rushing headlong forward. The funny thing is, though -none of this feels sad or morbid. It feels, rather, dry. Startlingly the way it is. And instead of a desperate nostalgia, I feel both freed to try again or anew at things that matter to me and responsible for my point in time. In all this, the meaning is intrinsic, since any larger point is a fantasy. And so my love for this point of life on Earth, for handing it down to Isaiah's generation -for instance- that, too, is intrinsic. Simply because it is more meaningful to have been a point in time that way, to have been an unrecognized, unrecorded, headed-to-dust lover of beauty here in this blink of an eye.
252 of 365 : Paradoxically, we could use a can-do attitude like that found in Dubai, most un-ecological of cities, before the Great Recession. What that city bloated on building and speculation, whose input of energy and output of waste was the largest per capita in the world, what that city felt like was change in the air. And now our entire civilization must change to become eco-logical. Entrenched in its ways, tired and reactive, it can't do. What conclusion to draw from this conjunction -that we need to feel ourselves creative and wealth-generating to seize innovation in our sensibility? And do the environmentalists speak to this motivation? They sometimes do, and are cynical about it. But modernity has its truth in the human spirit -we need to go forward, to something more glorious?
But what is glorious? Hegel suggested it was self-consciousness and the freedom that brings, self-consciousness shared across a society. And what is wealth? In the deserts outside Dubai, the sand sifts in eddies through the air, smooth and beautiful, and the Qaf tree dots the crown and level of the land, tough in its persistent adaptation. This wealth was erased by American style buildings. Can do, can't do -can do what?
253 of 365: All the hankering and dickering around which duties we have and to whom -to human rights or to species preservation, to humans or to non-humans- strikes me as a lot of smoke. When compassion leads you -and, contra Kant, it simply should, to lack the virtue of compassion is to lack a feature of morality- then there is only this -- some people who hurt, some beings who are suffering a loss of habitat and whose glory may disappear. That is to say, there is only life. We're alive; they're alive. Yes, I save the human over the snake, but the basic idea is that we should co-inhabit. Philosophers obsess over the trade-offs and miss the goal, toward which creativity can be harnessed far beyond expectation.
254 of 365 : Meet our kids. They are alive with wonder. This is the newly opened life -the miracle. In front of the innocence ---the shrunken-browed adults, cloud-eyed with background thoughts. "Tell us what you've been doing, grown-ups? Have you been outside of yourselves? No, don't tell us. Pre-oc-occu-pa-pied. Most definitely pre-occupied. Whether a penny is less than two, two seconds less than three?" Meanwhile, the kids, lost in the wind in the trees, wondering why.
255 : "I have been in the wilderness for a while." What does that mean? I have been lost? Why is the wild lost? Or, must it be the opposite of civilization? Aren't we lost in civilization, often? I am lost in the wild when I cannot reach medical care for my child. I am lost also when I forget human intercourse -an inarticulate silence. I am lost in civilization when I forget I am alive, and am also lost when oppression or status make me unfree or feel unfree. Wildness brings a sense of my living principle -yet it also brings cruel danger and numbing silence. Civilization brings conversation and the benefits of orderly cooperation -yet it also brings cruel classification and numbing routine. So, contra Thoreau, in wildness is not necessarily the preservation of the world, but of only certain things, and it is also the destruction of other things. And civilization is equally mixed.
256 of 365 : Poetry and the open, finite life. "Who, us?" Upstairs, the neighbors squeaking on floorboards, sound of cars on Lee Rd. Cold seeping in. Fall, not yet -soon.
Earth thought 251 of 365 : I've been having flashes recently of ... I don't know the word to describe it. I suddenly *realize* -the intuition, not just concept is there- that everything I or others do on this planet is here today, gone tomorrow -that the entire history of life is a point, gone, and with no one to record or watch it, or with no way to make sense of what it would be to record or watch it. It's just gone. This means that by gone-s are just that -in history, and also in my life. There is a speed under all this, rushing headlong forward. The funny thing is, though -none of this feels sad or morbid. It feels, rather, dry. Startlingly the way it is. And instead of a desperate nostalgia, I feel both freed to try again or anew at things that matter to me and responsible for my point in time. In all this, the meaning is intrinsic, since any larger point is a fantasy. And so my love for this point of life on Earth, for handing it down to Isaiah's generation -for instance- that, too, is intrinsic. Simply because it is more meaningful to have been a point in time that way, to have been an unrecognized, unrecorded, headed-to-dust lover of beauty here in this blink of an eye.
252 of 365 : Paradoxically, we could use a can-do attitude like that found in Dubai, most un-ecological of cities, before the Great Recession. What that city bloated on building and speculation, whose input of energy and output of waste was the largest per capita in the world, what that city felt like was change in the air. And now our entire civilization must change to become eco-logical. Entrenched in its ways, tired and reactive, it can't do. What conclusion to draw from this conjunction -that we need to feel ourselves creative and wealth-generating to seize innovation in our sensibility? And do the environmentalists speak to this motivation? They sometimes do, and are cynical about it. But modernity has its truth in the human spirit -we need to go forward, to something more glorious?
But what is glorious? Hegel suggested it was self-consciousness and the freedom that brings, self-consciousness shared across a society. And what is wealth? In the deserts outside Dubai, the sand sifts in eddies through the air, smooth and beautiful, and the Qaf tree dots the crown and level of the land, tough in its persistent adaptation. This wealth was erased by American style buildings. Can do, can't do -can do what?
253 of 365: All the hankering and dickering around which duties we have and to whom -to human rights or to species preservation, to humans or to non-humans- strikes me as a lot of smoke. When compassion leads you -and, contra Kant, it simply should, to lack the virtue of compassion is to lack a feature of morality- then there is only this -- some people who hurt, some beings who are suffering a loss of habitat and whose glory may disappear. That is to say, there is only life. We're alive; they're alive. Yes, I save the human over the snake, but the basic idea is that we should co-inhabit. Philosophers obsess over the trade-offs and miss the goal, toward which creativity can be harnessed far beyond expectation.
254 of 365 : Meet our kids. They are alive with wonder. This is the newly opened life -the miracle. In front of the innocence ---the shrunken-browed adults, cloud-eyed with background thoughts. "Tell us what you've been doing, grown-ups? Have you been outside of yourselves? No, don't tell us. Pre-oc-occu-pa-pied. Most definitely pre-occupied. Whether a penny is less than two, two seconds less than three?" Meanwhile, the kids, lost in the wind in the trees, wondering why.
255 : "I have been in the wilderness for a while." What does that mean? I have been lost? Why is the wild lost? Or, must it be the opposite of civilization? Aren't we lost in civilization, often? I am lost in the wild when I cannot reach medical care for my child. I am lost also when I forget human intercourse -an inarticulate silence. I am lost in civilization when I forget I am alive, and am also lost when oppression or status make me unfree or feel unfree. Wildness brings a sense of my living principle -yet it also brings cruel danger and numbing silence. Civilization brings conversation and the benefits of orderly cooperation -yet it also brings cruel classification and numbing routine. So, contra Thoreau, in wildness is not necessarily the preservation of the world, but of only certain things, and it is also the destruction of other things. And civilization is equally mixed.
256 of 365 : Poetry and the open, finite life. "Who, us?" Upstairs, the neighbors squeaking on floorboards, sound of cars on Lee Rd. Cold seeping in. Fall, not yet -soon.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
246-249
246 of 365 : Braungart and McDonaugh talk of the technosphere and the biosphere. The former is the realm of our technology and the latter the realm of living beings and the biotic processes with which they are involved (such as water purification by wetlands). The problem with our technosphere is that it interferes with the biosphere, rather than being a closed loop with itself that lets the biosphere be. The sailboat, for instance, uses energy in a way that lets the biosphere be, but not the combustion engine. I thought of these things tonight, driving home. My car, out of whack, a poorly designed element in a poorly designed civilization that interferes with the biosphere.
247 of 365 : Seeing a hawk glide above a ridge-line for minutes on minutes -what design!
248 of 365 : Everything has its system, including emotional ecology. Our inner lives are ecological, too. Feelings emerge from long adaptation -both biologically in our gene line disposition and environmentally in our personal histories, ways we coped and ways that coping stuck. Imagine the industrial approach to our feeling -for instance, the new age positive feeling corporate packaged self-help tune up: it is about as fitting to our inner ecology as a tire plant. Its very advice spews out harmful by-products -the annoying mannerism sitting in an unintegrated way on top of feelings with long history and nuance. Even the haste with which we attack ourselves to clean up the mess betrays industrial design -we push and package, when the freaky idiosyncrasy has its long, adaptive reason. The eco-logical world, then, involves patience and understanding of our contexts, our stories, and time to let restorative work emerge within the mess as complex, organic innovation.
.
249 of 365 : Looking at kids play reveals our wild inner ecology. How do we let that get ironed out? All that needs trimming are the immoral emotions -the greed, aggression and avoidance of responsibility. The wildness, however, can remain, helpfully, beyond that.
.
247 of 365 : Seeing a hawk glide above a ridge-line for minutes on minutes -what design!
248 of 365 : Everything has its system, including emotional ecology. Our inner lives are ecological, too. Feelings emerge from long adaptation -both biologically in our gene line disposition and environmentally in our personal histories, ways we coped and ways that coping stuck. Imagine the industrial approach to our feeling -for instance, the new age positive feeling corporate packaged self-help tune up: it is about as fitting to our inner ecology as a tire plant. Its very advice spews out harmful by-products -the annoying mannerism sitting in an unintegrated way on top of feelings with long history and nuance. Even the haste with which we attack ourselves to clean up the mess betrays industrial design -we push and package, when the freaky idiosyncrasy has its long, adaptive reason. The eco-logical world, then, involves patience and understanding of our contexts, our stories, and time to let restorative work emerge within the mess as complex, organic innovation.
.
249 of 365 : Looking at kids play reveals our wild inner ecology. How do we let that get ironed out? All that needs trimming are the immoral emotions -the greed, aggression and avoidance of responsibility. The wildness, however, can remain, helpfully, beyond that.
.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Mid-week
Earth thought 243: Everything alive has its system. When the system's thrown out, there's death. So a report discussed days ago describes how lizards are going extinct at alarming rates, because the planet is heating up from greenhouse gas effect. They run for cover in the shade rather than overheat, but then they lose valuable feeding time. And many migrate to cooler climes -but then they compete with the lizard species already there until some go extinct. Climate change is happening too quickly for them to adapt by evolving. Their system's thrown out by a hotter planet, and their genetic lines die out after so many millions of years of evolution.
Earth thought 244 of 365 : From an abstract, visiting-the-world-from-outer-space height, much of contemporary human society within globalization seems so impractical. People run around pursuing private wealth or personal ambition while harboring vague fears that could better be faced in groups. It isn't uncommon to hear people worry about climate change or the off-gassing and abraiding of toxins or carcinogens in our environment. But on we go, in our own private worlds, instead of coming together in groups to examine our world, its limits, its points of potential responsibility.
Earth thought 245 of 365 : Environmentalism is a historically situated way of life. Ideally, attending wisely to our home on Earth would be a part of being wise. But (1) I exist in a culture that scarcely recognizes our home on Earth, ironic as that may be; (2) homo sapiens only now, for the first time, can be aware of its long range and widespread ecological effects -this due to natural science and objective history. The homo sapiens of 12,000 years ago was a long term ecological mess -consider the mass extinction of megafauna our ancestors initiated back then. But this mess paled next to the ecological blindness that is an assumption of the industrial world, which acts as if the Earth is not our home. And so environmentalism is historically situated in two embedded craters, so to speak -the crater of the industrial revolution, and the crater of homo sapiens's coming to technology. It is an anti-toxin for the industrial revolution, and an awakening for homo sapiens, a new way of life for this being that can be said to enter a little bit more into maturity and leave adolescence a little bit sooner with the advent of ecological consciousness and environmental wisdom.
Earth thought 244 of 365 : From an abstract, visiting-the-world-from-outer-space height, much of contemporary human society within globalization seems so impractical. People run around pursuing private wealth or personal ambition while harboring vague fears that could better be faced in groups. It isn't uncommon to hear people worry about climate change or the off-gassing and abraiding of toxins or carcinogens in our environment. But on we go, in our own private worlds, instead of coming together in groups to examine our world, its limits, its points of potential responsibility.
Earth thought 245 of 365 : Environmentalism is a historically situated way of life. Ideally, attending wisely to our home on Earth would be a part of being wise. But (1) I exist in a culture that scarcely recognizes our home on Earth, ironic as that may be; (2) homo sapiens only now, for the first time, can be aware of its long range and widespread ecological effects -this due to natural science and objective history. The homo sapiens of 12,000 years ago was a long term ecological mess -consider the mass extinction of megafauna our ancestors initiated back then. But this mess paled next to the ecological blindness that is an assumption of the industrial world, which acts as if the Earth is not our home. And so environmentalism is historically situated in two embedded craters, so to speak -the crater of the industrial revolution, and the crater of homo sapiens's coming to technology. It is an anti-toxin for the industrial revolution, and an awakening for homo sapiens, a new way of life for this being that can be said to enter a little bit more into maturity and leave adolescence a little bit sooner with the advent of ecological consciousness and environmental wisdom.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Earth thoughts 238-242
Earth thought 238 of 365 : I am uneasy, too, about the way environmentalism seems to conflict with the human rights tradition, at least in the minds of some working within each camp. There is a human vs. non-human life dichotomy that plays into this tension. The environmentalists call it "anthropocentrism" and claim that the circle of moral concern is arbitrarily circumscribed around humans, while the humanitarians call it "freedom" and claim that beings without it -all non-humans so they say- are not the primary focus of morality and politics. What is missing here, again, is an ethos that accounts for the environment inside the human good, and which discovers the human good through attention to what is best in us. And what is that? It is, in part, thoughtfulness with the living. It is, in part too, rich identification with our home, internalizing the context out of which the human world makes sense in a way that honors the meaning in it. It is, finally, the wise and thoughtful use of conditions.
Earth thought 239 of 365 : How shall we be made in this short life of ours? The bugs and the humans, the mice and the wasps in the summer. They continue on, like ants, doing no harm to their world, with which they have evolved. They are symbiotic, carrying pollen, aerating soil, turning over life like worms or fungus farming underground insects. And us, we who have the power to substantially throw off these tight-knit multi-age cycles? Where are we in this home that has been our origin? Why are we dislocated like a top spinning along concrete? Why does our presence take and not give back? Why are we the anxious, self-blind takers, the visionary beings more blind-sighted than a mole? Look at our children -before TV has arrested their minds- they turn upward in wonder at the rest. Why the gap between us and them, the loss of perception?
240 : : Here is a paradox. The people who run organizations, who are in power, who have the right to move things this direction or that in an organization -these are also the people whose time is overdetermined, fragmented, and who simply don't have much space to dwell on difficult, long-range things that fall outside the organization's immediate and mid-range goals. So the ones who can cannot. And this leaves it up to a constituency -say, to co-workers or to the public- to do the long-range thinking for the leader. Hence, the first virtue of a leader: the ability and the humility to listen, and the allocated time to listen amid the busy day.
Earth thought 241 : What would be an effective environmental ethics curriculum? Would it be to include a little bit of environmentalism in each course? Or rather to mandate a series of interlocked courses -ecology, environmental ethics, environmental policy? What curriculum could support the latter as a matter of general education? Or how about this -a curriculum with experiential ecology and self-knowledge built in, where students write on their lives from their own experience? Suppose we pulled environmentalism from ourselves, rather than inculcating it?
Earth thought 242 : I worry about environmentalism acquiring the status of an ideology -something that we inculcate, rather than something that develops from within the good sense of people. Take morality as a comparison. We do train our kids to be moral. Yet, at the same time, morality emerges out of and formulates nascent and diffuse emotions and ideas -such as compassion (an emotion) or fairness (an idea). Morality is visceral, and its visceral quality is a defense against ideology, a phenomenological source of counter-intuition against indoctrination. I believe that environmental consciousness is also visceral. Yet it is unclear to me that the so-called "Green movement" is currently drawing on that quality in many of the institutionally-rushed contexts where "Green" needs to suddenly be part of education. Thoreau didn't call himself an environmentalist or advance such an agenda -he just lived as a thoughtful human in nature.
Earth thought 239 of 365 : How shall we be made in this short life of ours? The bugs and the humans, the mice and the wasps in the summer. They continue on, like ants, doing no harm to their world, with which they have evolved. They are symbiotic, carrying pollen, aerating soil, turning over life like worms or fungus farming underground insects. And us, we who have the power to substantially throw off these tight-knit multi-age cycles? Where are we in this home that has been our origin? Why are we dislocated like a top spinning along concrete? Why does our presence take and not give back? Why are we the anxious, self-blind takers, the visionary beings more blind-sighted than a mole? Look at our children -before TV has arrested their minds- they turn upward in wonder at the rest. Why the gap between us and them, the loss of perception?
240 : : Here is a paradox. The people who run organizations, who are in power, who have the right to move things this direction or that in an organization -these are also the people whose time is overdetermined, fragmented, and who simply don't have much space to dwell on difficult, long-range things that fall outside the organization's immediate and mid-range goals. So the ones who can cannot. And this leaves it up to a constituency -say, to co-workers or to the public- to do the long-range thinking for the leader. Hence, the first virtue of a leader: the ability and the humility to listen, and the allocated time to listen amid the busy day.
Earth thought 241 : What would be an effective environmental ethics curriculum? Would it be to include a little bit of environmentalism in each course? Or rather to mandate a series of interlocked courses -ecology, environmental ethics, environmental policy? What curriculum could support the latter as a matter of general education? Or how about this -a curriculum with experiential ecology and self-knowledge built in, where students write on their lives from their own experience? Suppose we pulled environmentalism from ourselves, rather than inculcating it?
Earth thought 242 : I worry about environmentalism acquiring the status of an ideology -something that we inculcate, rather than something that develops from within the good sense of people. Take morality as a comparison. We do train our kids to be moral. Yet, at the same time, morality emerges out of and formulates nascent and diffuse emotions and ideas -such as compassion (an emotion) or fairness (an idea). Morality is visceral, and its visceral quality is a defense against ideology, a phenomenological source of counter-intuition against indoctrination. I believe that environmental consciousness is also visceral. Yet it is unclear to me that the so-called "Green movement" is currently drawing on that quality in many of the institutionally-rushed contexts where "Green" needs to suddenly be part of education. Thoreau didn't call himself an environmentalist or advance such an agenda -he just lived as a thoughtful human in nature.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
237
Earth thought 237 of 365 : I've felt uneasy of late about the disaster focus in environmentalism. It's understandable. How wishful I'd be if I denied my reality because it isn't "positive" enough when it really isn't "positive". And there are very severe things coming to the surface concerning our effect on the global environment. But perhaps I can put the dissatisfaction this way - an environmentalism worth its name is a way of life, an ethos. That keys it to human flourishing. Inside it, of course, yes, the bad is seen as bad, worried over, and our responsibility is summoned against it. But it gains its context and focus from the larger vision of goodness. I am not convinced we have this larger picture of goodness when it comes to worrying over environmental disasters. At least, I don't.
Monday, August 16, 2010
236
Earth thought 236 : I wrote yesterday of showers, of taking showers. As I did, I cringed inside, knowing that the picture of the shower-taking world is trivial; there, look -the world of people without clean water, let alone shower water; the world of people in a flood (in Pakistan). And beyond the poverty which is a main enabler of these problems, if not the cause per se, the disturbing thing is how when you get to them, they have already been set in motion long before the problem bursts out. The country's population has exploded beyond what is sustainable, for instance, or poor construction has pre-damned, yes, "pre-damned", people. Environmental problems burst out big, but so often the causes lie far afield, beforehand, disasters waiting to happen.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
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 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.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
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.
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.
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