A Change in the Wind

Everything Is Either Enlightening or Toxic

At the recent Festival of Books in Los Angeles, the world-class essayist Rebecca Solnit, chairing a panel on sustainable living, mused out loud on "the organic movement," and had a Great Thought. She said:

The organic movement has created a picture of a black or white world: You eat it [something organic] and you see Buddha; or you might as well be eating Agent Orange. Everything is either enlightening or toxic.

At Whole Foods, I can almost hear what they're thinking: Yeah, and so? That's our business model!

[here's Solnit, via Scott Sommerdorf and the Chronicle]

Hell is the Truth Understood Too Late

The decision we as a species face on climate is so overwhelming it's understandable that we cannot seem to open our eyes to it. But for the same overwhelming reasons, we must.

Here's a quote that might help us see. The late Israeli reporter and writer Amos Elon warned his people in l967 that they would regret their unthinking decision to occupy Palestine, no matter how good it felt in the moment. In a superb recounting by Marlene Nadle (in the Los Angeles Times op-ed section for 6/7/09, in a piece called "Amos Elon and the Death of Hope") Nadle quotes Elon as saying:

HELL IS THE TRUTH UNDERSTOOD TOO LATE

Let me put it in context (because the Los Angeles Times search function is hopelessly unable to find this first-rate piece, no matter how many clues you give it, I'm sorry to say). Nadle wrote:

Elon had been one of the few at time [in l967] to write that the occupation would be a disaster. That night in New York, explaining to his countrymen, he said that the emotions of religious nationalism blinded them and caused them to miscalculate, and them assume the Palestinians weren't a military threat and wouldn't be in the future. "Hell is the truth understood too late," Elon concluded, surveying the burning landscape of suicide bombers and vengeful tanks.

Need I explain the relevance of this quote to climate preservation? I expect not...here's Elon:

Trying to Figure Out the Shape of the World

I'm not a big fan of talks on the Internet, but I have to admit, I liked this one from Mythbusters, whatever that is...by Adam Savage, a delightful art director, on how much he learned from his colossal failures. 

No transcript, unfortunately, but he concludes with a lovely line, in which he talks about kids and how they will push up against rules and boundaries, like a blindfolded person in a room, looking for the walls -- "trying to figure out the shape of the world."

[Talk is about thirty-five minutes long; didn't hear Q & A...h/p: Metafilter]

Why Can't Agnosticism Get a Break? Part II

Why can't agnosticism get a break? Is it our culture's insistence on certainty, either pro or con? Who knows, but here's another example of the obnoxiousness of so many atheists. As Charlotte Harris writes for the Los Angeles Times, atheists all too often turn off those they claim to want to convince with the obnoxiousness of their attitude. They take a flying leap at faith and one ends up just wishing they would take a flying leap, period. Harris writes:

I can't stand atheists -- but it's not because they don't believe in God. It's because they're crashing bores. My problem with atheists is their tiresome -- and way old -- insistence that they are being oppressed and their fixation with the fine points of Christianity. What -- did their Sunday school teachers flog their behinds with a Bible when they were kids?

Atheist website after atheist website insists that Jesus either didn't exist or "was a jerk" (in the words of one blogger) because he didn't eliminate smallpox or world poverty. At the American Atheists website, a writer complains that God "set up" Adam and Eve, knowing in advance that they would eat the forbidden fruit. A blogger on A Is for Atheist has been going through the Bible chapter by chapter and verse by verse in order to prove its "insanity" (he or she had gotten up to the Book of Joshua when I last looked).Lack of scientific evidence for the existence of God proves nothing, of course.

Suggestive hints of what Emerson called "a communication between spirits" beyond our knowing also prove nothing, although such instances usually are much more interesting than rants against faith.

Here's a suggestive hint of such a communication from the Cheever biography, while I'm thinking of it.

Towards the end of his life, Cheever was misdiagnosed and mistreated by many of his doctors, or so his biographer reports with a hint of bitterness. But one young doctor, an oncologist named Robert Schneider, did diagnose Cheever accurately. Schneider, unlike Cheever's other doctors, insisted that Cheever not drink. The misdiagnosing doctors didn't care. Cheever took this as a sign of Schneider's sincerity. Here's what happened when Cheever died:

In Bronxville...the young oncologist was playing with his three-year-old son when a stream of sunlight gushed into the room and he felt so weak he had to lie down. "I thought something bad had happened to someone, I wasn't sure who," [Schneider said]. "Then Mary [Cheever] called and said John has passed. We had a bond. There are people in your life and you're glad they were part of your life."

Folk singer Iris Dement expresses my viewpoint on faith simply and well in her song Let the Mystery Be:

Everybody's wonderin' what and where they they all came from
everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go
when the whole thing's done
but no one knows for certain
and so it's all the same to me
I think I'll just let the mystery be

But speaking of the obnoxiousness of some atheists, here's the astoundingly succinct Ted Rall:

Why Can't Agnostics Get Any Respect?

Most people lump atheists and agnostics together, which is just plain dumb, as simple-minded as lumping together Christians and Muslims, because they both believe in one God.

Knowing there is no God and not knowing if there is a God are two completely different beliefs.

Why is that so difficult for so many people to comprehend?

At least we have Matt Taibbi to speak up for agnosticism.

Via Andrew Sullivan:

I’m always on the lookout for religion’s latest counter-arguments, the new rhetorical approaches that God People are constantly fine-tuning for use in pimping the righteousness of faith (and for demonstrating the moral dissoluteness of agnostics like myself). There isn’t an inherently irresolvable metaphysical challenge that comes close to wasting as much of the world’s time and energy as this particular one. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the eternal R&D quest for a baldness cure: you just never stop being surprised at how many different ways men can find to fail at growing hair...

As for the actual argument, it’s the same old stuff religious apologists have been croaking out since the days of Bertrand Russell — namely that because science is inadequate to explain the mysteries of existence, faith must be necessary. Life would be meaningless without religion, therefore we must have religion.

But this sort of thinking is exactly what most agnostics find ridiculous about religion and religious people, who seem incapable of looking at the world unless it’s through the prism of some kind of belief system. They seem to think that if one doesn’t believe in God, one must believe in something else, because to live without answers would be intolerable. And maybe that’s true of the humorless Richard Dawkins, who does seem actually to have tried to turn atheism into a kind of religion unto itself. But there are plenty of other people who are simply comfortable not knowing the answers. It always seemed weird to me that this quality of not needing an explanation and just being cool with what few answers we have  inspires such verbose indignation in people like Eagleton and Fish. They seem determined to prove that the quality of not believing in heaven and hell and burning bushes and saints is a rigid dogma all unto itself, as though it required a concerted intellectual effort to disbelieve in a God who thinks gays (Leviticus 20:13) or people who work on Sunday (Exodus 35:2) should be put to death. They’ll tie themselves into knots arguing this, and they’ll probably never stop. It’s really strange.

But no less than Graham Greene failed to see the distinction, even as he admired the effort (from The Lawless Roads):

For one can respect an atheist as one cannot respect a deist: once accept a God and reason should carry you further, but to accept nothing at all -- that requires some stubbornness, some courage.

Seems to me that by that standard, agnosticism requires considerably more guts than atheism. 

John Lennon probably put it best (in one of his disbelieving moods)

Above us, only sky...

Sky Blue, by question of lust.

The Upside of the Economic Downslide

Less traffic. According to the WSJ:

Rush-hour congestion -- defined as moving slower than free-flowing traffic -- in the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan markets fell 29% in 2008 versus 2007, said Rick Schuman, a vice president at Inrix, a Washington company that measures traffic patterns. It fell an additional 7% in this year's first quarter.
...
The decline in miles driven began when gasoline prices crept above $3 a gallon in November 2007. By the time prices began to retreat from their $4-a-gallon high in mid-2008, the number of unemployed Americans began to rise.

No drop of such significance has been previously recorded. With the exceptions of a few short-lived dips during previous recessions, Americans have driven more every year since national record-keeping began.

The impact of the 1.9% decrease in miles driven this year is magnified by the nature of congestion. The capacity of many major U.S. roads is at a constant tipping point, Mr. Schuman said. When capacity is reached, the addition or subtraction of a relatively small number of vehicles can have an outsize effect on traffic flow. That is especially true at the nation's bottlenecks -- when traffic moves at less than half the speed of free-flowing traffic -- the number and severity of which decreased by about one-third from 2007 to 2008, Mr. Schuman said.

Gas consumption in California is down:

Gasoline consumption in California began falling in April 2006, and for 11 straight calendar quarters dropped below gas use in the year-earlier period even though the state added 790,000 new licensed drivers. First-quarter gasoline use hasn't yet been released by the California State Board of Equalization, which on Thursday said Californians consumed 1.21 billion gallons of gasoline in January, down 22 million gallons, or 1.8%, from the previous January.

More land available for preservation groups to buy, in places such as the Hudson Valley:

Real estate in the Hudson Valley has turned into a buyer's market. Open space is at bargain-basement prices, and new construction has stalled.

For land preservation groups, this is an unprecedented window of opportunity.

"Now is the time to buy, before the next wave of development pressure occurs," said Steve Rosenberg, executive director of the Scenic Hudson Land Trust.

And in Florida, the rise of the "un-developers":

Two men have big plans for the Georgetown property, 160 acres on the southwest side of the Tampa peninsula. But they are not planning to build.

[Greg] Chelius is state director for the Trust for Public Land. {Alex] Size is from the nonprofit's St. Petersburg office. Because of the steep decline in property values here, they believe they have a chance to help local government purchase and preserve this stretch of waterfront. A few months ago, it was slated to be covered with luxury condominiums, "mansion" town houses and single-family homes.

Instead, Chelius and Size spoke about the native plants that could be restored -- the sabal palmetto palm, the seagrape trees, the three native species of mangrove. With the vegetation would come more native animals, more birds.

"We're sort of like the un-developers right now," Chelius said, smiling.

As you might expect, greenhouse gas emissions are down:

A report issued Monday by the Washington-based Environmental Integrity Project says that because of the recent economic slowdown and milder-than-usual weather, carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants dropped 3.1 percent in 2008, a departure from the recent trends in power plant carbon dioxide emissions, which have risen 0.9 percent since 2003, and 4.5 percent since 1998, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency.

And, most astonishing, the possibility that unemployment might actually be health-enhancing: 

The health of a population tends to improve slightly when the economy goes south. While some causes of death, such as suicide, increase during a recession, many others decrease. Among them: car crashes, industrial accidents, heart attacks and, in some cities, infant deaths.

"I was very surprised at first," said Christopher Ruhm, a professor of economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In studies over the past 10 years, Ruhm has consistently found death rates decline during recessions and rise when the economy expands. If unemployment rises 1 percent, he estimates the death rate will fall by about half a percent.

"I tracked things like unemployment and mortality and found that they were almost a mirror image of each other," Ruhm said.

Other researchers have found evidence of improved health during economic downturns in Cuba, Germany, Japan and Spain. Think of it as a silver lining -- and perhaps a measure of how much our unhealthy lifestyles and workaholic tendencies can get the best of us during boom times.

It's been true for me; lost weight, a lowered blood pressure, better outlook. Believe it or don't.

The Smell of a Serial Killer

A young woman reporter from Vancouver known as raincoaster recounts her all-too-close encounter with Canada's worst serial killer. What she remembers best about pig farmer Robert Pickton is the way he smells:

My family has farms, I know what pigs and pig farming smell like, and I know what a shower can do for that. I also know, from my other researches, that serial killers are associated with a particular smell. Willie didn’t smell like pigs, he smelt like something that is nearly impossible to describe. If metal could rot, that would be the smell of it; it was tangy, it seemed charged with negative ions, it nearly made my eyes water, and it was physically repulsive in the extreme.

Yikes. It's a very creepy story, esp for a father. Read it here...if you dare. Here's a drawing by Daylife of the man accused of killing dozens of women, based on a video from his cell.

Hopeless Optimism (by Billy Collins)

When it comes to preserving the climate we have come to know and love, this blog has documented in exhausting detail over the last five years reasons not to be optimistic. This documentation comes out of a desire to do the right thing for the planet that has given us life, not -- of course -- out of a desire to make anyone feel bad, although many of my readers nonetheless hold me accountable for the latter. (No matter how many interesting and/or beautiful other thoughts and visuals I may try to post.)

Such as life in the 21st century. I'm not going to whine about it; I'm very happy to be alive and posting, here and now. But it's worth remembering that past times had their own bitternesses, too many to count, and to remember how folks in the past dealt with that. A truly excellent example comes from the Big Think site via the marvelously light-footed poet Billy Collins, who recounts his life philosophy, which he describes as "hopeless optimism," and uses a Turkish proverb to explain. Here's Billy:

And for those, like me, who weary of video, here's the proverb on which Collins bases his philosophy:

Every time the ax goes into the forest, all the trees think: At least the handle is one of us.

Geo-Engineering the Climate: Are We Just Not Cynical Enough?

The Virginia Quarterly Review, arguably the best literary journal in the country, has the nerve this quarter to take on an urgent issue, and dispatches Pat Joseph to look at geo-engineering the climate.

He avoids stating his conclusion, but does a masterful job of laying out the facts. See here:

The Obama administration will no doubt reengage in diplomatic efforts, but the growing economic crisis, combined with falling oil and coal prices, does not bode well for the negotiations at this year’s climate summit in Copenhagen. Furthermore, diplomacy is only part of the story. Fundamentally, global warming is an energy problem, and solving it will require nothing less than a complete and radical transformation of the world’s energy infrastructure, something most energy experts believe will take decades, if it happens at all.

As [Nobel Prize winner and geo-engineering advocate] Paul Crutzen stressed in his essay, “The very best would be if emissions of the greenhouse gases could be reduced so much that the stratospheric sulfur release experiment would not need to take place. Currently, this looks like a pious wish.”

But what's really disturbing, according to Joseph and Stanford physicist Ken Caldeira, is the possibility that we will do nothing at all. As Caldeira says:

I think the most likely thing is we don’t do anything. We don’t reduce emissions, and we don’t do geoengineering.

So we guarantee extinction for a million or more other species on the planet, while doing nothing for our good, either. Caldeira and Joseph can only laugh at the absurdity of the situation, in which our species, with all its vast mental powers, is as hopelessly frozen as Buridan's Ass, the mythical dim-bulb donkey placed halfway between two bins of food, and starves to death, unable to choose either.

Wish I could tell them that they're all wrong, that humans are much better than that...but for now, here's a thoughtful photo of the Maldives, threatened by sea level rise, courtesy of m o d e. 

Climate: What We Need is a Rhetoric of Salvation

Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University who specializes in studying social activism and the environmental movement in particular, wrote a response to a post on Andy Revkin's Dot Earth site this past Sunday that has been widely admired. It's critical of the language climate preservationists use to describe the crisis, and points out a contrast to the visionary speech-making of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Is that a fair comparison? I'm not sure, and I'm not sure "a rhetoric of salvation" is even possible with climate, given what the science is telling us about the warming in the pipeline. But is it true that climate preservationists have failed to inspire the public? With the possible exception of Al Gore -- yes.

So it's worth thinking over what Brulle had to say. Take it away, Robert...

It seems to me that a discussion of tipping points is useful in terms of discussing the science of nonlinear processes. But this is hardly the type of language that will increase issue saliency in the public. When you set a specific goal, or say if we go over some threshold the risk will increase dramatically, you are then linking action to a specific scientific claim that can be disputed. Since we aren’t yet past the tipping points, or if we are past them, the evidence has not emerged unambiguously from the background variance, it is difficult to maintain the truth of dire predictions in the future.

Yet the environmental movement uses these thresholds as a rallying cry. Bill McKibben’s organization http://350.org sets a specific ppm concentration as its goal and as its namesake. I am in no position to dispute the validity of this specific CO2 concentration. But I see this type of language as lacking rhetorical resonance with the public.

Social movement research over the past 40 years has shown that an effective social movement will be based on a rhetoric of salvation. It contains an analysis of how we entered into our current problematic situation, and how evil it is. It then projects how we can work to move ourselves out of this state and toward a resolution of the current problems and into a beneficial situation. Thus an effective rhetoric critiques the current situation and offers a Utopian vision of where the society needs to go. It is this combination of threats and opportunities, - nightmares combined with dreams – that fuel social movement mobilization and social change.

The civil rights movement provides an excellent example. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King combined both the nightmare of racial injustice with the utopian dream of a just society into a seamless narrative. This speech became an icon for the movement, defining a sense of injustice (threat) and opportunities for effective action (hope).

The use of specific empirical targets (350 ppm, or 2 degrees) ignores this rhetorical requirement. Instead we are presented with a technocratic language that is not at all immediately apparent what is being advocated. Additionally, it is a rhetoric without utopia, but rather constraints. There is no positive vision of a future in which we can realistically deal with global warming and have a positive outcome. The chants of “green jobs” are hardly the type of rhetoric that will motivate strong social movements. Think of how ridiculous it would have been if Martin Luther King Jr. had stood up with graphs about racial discrimination and set some sort of empirical goal. Instead, he appealed to the sense of justice in the face of injustice, and projected a vision of an alternative social order that motivated scores of people to put their bodies and lives on the line to achieve this goal.

The environmental movement used to understand and utilize this type of language. The original Wilderness Act called for the creation of places “where the Earth ant its community of life are untrammeled by man.” The Clean Water Act set the goal of cleaning up the waters so that we could fish and swim in our rivers. These are easily visualized goals, and define a Utopian vision of a better life.

The reliance on technocratic language, and the absence of a Utopian vision of a sustainable social order, greatly inhibit the salience of global warming issues in the general public.