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?
Friday, September 10, 2010
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.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
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 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.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
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 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.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
192-195
.
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 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.
Friday, July 2, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
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?
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?
Friday, June 25, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, June 21, 2010
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?
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?
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
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.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)