Our Little Blue Planet

The symbol for the environmental movement has long been our blue planet Earth as seen from outer space- and I think it's a damn shame. It seems to me the Earth is too large and abstract, too big and impersonal, too dis-embodied, to really love. Not that people can't develop a strong personal connection with a large and abstract entity- take God for example. In religion, love is awe: the love of God is big and mysterious and unknowable- and we must return that love based on faith rather than anything we might receive through our senses. To me, that’s the opposite of what love of nature really is. In love of nature, we come to love through our senses- through our experience of our bodies touching the world around us. Sure, the Earth is a powerful symbol, but disturbing as well. It symbolizes of the meaninglessness of our little lives. It sums up all the great patchwork mess, the geological and biological diversity of the planet, in a single one-ness. But environmentalism to me is expressing a love for a little piece of the Earth, not the planet as a whole. I’d prefer a smaller, more human-scale symbol for my environmental movement. Maybe a child growing a seed in a Dixie cup. Or an old man sitting on a tree stump, deep in thought. Or a kid catching a frog. The Earth-symbol somehow represents to me the environmentalism that treats science as a religion, that treats the word of James Hansen as the word of God. Let’s move towards a more populist environmentalism, and embrace the multitude of environmentalists. The farmers, the gardeners, the landscapers, the hunters, the trappers, the fishermen, the naturalists, the pigeon-fanciers, the ghost dancers, the spirit healers, the shamans, the holy men.

Still life with pipe and book

“With Pipe and Book”, the great used book store/tobacconist in Lake Placid, has closed. The store was wonderfully anachronistic, a monument to a time when pipes and books mattered.  The era of leisurely reading in the evening, pipe in hand, has long since passed. Now we have so many more choices: to read or to surf the internet. To watch TV, chat electronically with friends. The choices are killing us! We have the choice to eat lovingly-prepared foods or to eat processed junk, and we choose the junk. We have the choice of reading books that stretch our imagination and our intellect, but we choose to overload our senses with noisy nothingness. We choose to shop at Wal-Mart, eat at McDonalds. When given the choice, we repeatedly fail to live well. Back in the era of pipes and books, there was little choice but to read or to have face-to-face exchanges with fellow humans.  Either that or waste away in silent darkness. Sometimes the only choice we had for occupying our minds was to sit and think (pipe in hand, of course). Now we have the choice: to think or not to think. And we often choose not to think.

As a libertarian it feels strange to say this, but I guess I don’t always want a choice. Maybe sometimes we just have to consciously surrender our choice, not to the government (of course) but to our own social and religious affiliations. For instance, if I were to name a child, I would probably choose a family name. There are far too many names out there- never mind all the made-up names I could potentially conjure. I would choose to select from a far more limited set of choices that includes the names of my grandparents, great uncles, great grandparents. Perhaps freedom is living in a world of respected mores, family customs and cultural and religious traditions, of unspoken rules and structure, where individuals choose their choice-limiting structures out of love and honor and commitment. True freedom of choice is bewildering, unsettling. Like the world envisioned by Sartre, who claimed that we must formulate our own personal essence from the ground up, one agonizing choice at a time. But really nobody can do that. Nobody can self-create. We need structures: parents to lean on, customs to follow, mores to obey.  Perhaps libertarianism is a pragmatic political ideology in that it allows communities to flourish without outside intervention and allows people to limit their choices in ways that imbue their lives with meaning and self-worth.

Free markets are surely not the ultimate answer, as they largely fuel the fire of excessive choice. Why is it that so many libertarians think that free markets will solve everything? Without strong communities, strong families, strong cultural grounding, free markets will just fuel our destructive joyride through life. Free markets are good for getting people what they want, efficiently and cheaply. This is marvelous and indispensable, but there is more to life than getting what we want. The free market will turn us all into spoiled children if we don’t watch out.  The free market is not a path to a satisfying life, it is not inherently good or evil. It is just an efficient means for distribution of scarce goods among people. And certainly central government is not the answer either. Central government takes the most important choices away from the people who actually care about the outcome.  Central government removes choice but replaces it by the evils of fear and indifference.  A central government does not respect the self-worth of the individual and makes decrees that people have no personal stake in obeying, except out of fear.  

I guess what I'm saying is that the virtues of hard work, hard thought, hard love, are paramount. We can’t sink into complacency and think that free markets or government will solve all of our problems. A satisfying life requires character, developing strong ties with other human beings, working hard to reach difficult goals. But developing character is hard work. It’s easier to watch TV, following the political circus on MSNBC as if we’re affecting the play, or to lose ourselves in video games depicting a better, more exciting world.  And the choice is ours: to lead a meaningful life or to make the comfortable choice.  To trek into the wilderness or to buy the heated mattress pad.

So we haven't arrived at any answers, really.  Whatever, the questions are always more interesting than the answers anyway.  I don't know what I'm going to do this next week, never mind for the rest of my life, but for now maybe I'll just fall back in time for a few moments, and sit down with a book and a pipe.  I don't own a pipe, but doesn't that sound pretty good right about now?  

The Grinch that stole Copenhagen...

I guess I'm a contrarian, but the words "global consensus" kind of give me the chills.  I've been thinking a bit about Copenhagen, and global warming, and I'm not really comforted by the thought of the world coming together on some sort of agenda for action. I could probably get behind a treaty of non-violence (non-action?), a global agreement not to mess with other peoples business. But I don't like the thought of large numbers of people - entire countries - agreeing to engage in some action. As a contrarian, I love discord, disagreement, debate, and I can't stand to see the Whos down in Whoville singing their happy songs in unison! Maybe my heart is just a few sizes too small? Or maybe, just maybe we need to step back and think about what we are doing here. Global warming is a statist's dream- an opportunity to centralize power at a global scale. I don't want to sound like one of those right-wing nuts screaming about the New World Order, but let's just make sure we understand what we are giving up for the possibility of slightly reducing the expected magnitude of climate change. Is 350 really worth it? Might we do something better with all this youthful passion for saving the planet? How about this: rather than placing our faith in some global consensus, each of us expresses our love for the planet spontaneously and willingly, in our own way...

Freedom and the Central Limit Theorem

This may sound dorky, but I think we need to retain maximum degrees of freedom in society, in a statistical sense. The more degrees of freedom we have, the more the law of large numbers - the central limit theorem - can work its magic.  The central limit theorem is a buffer against tyranny.  In the absence of force lies true normality.  Under the law of large numbers, humans and society itself will tend toward its natural mean. Variance is important to our system. In variance lies our societal resilience. Inter-personal variance is the source of innovation, new ideas. But without the large numbers, the degrees of freedom, the sample mean can easily become biased from the true mean. When the law of large numbers breaks down, the mean becomes subject to increasing random drift. The more governments or large institutions control the people, the more correlation among people, the lower the effective population size and the effective degrees of freedom. At the extreme, we become a society of ants, in which we are so inter-correlated that we are in effect one superorganism- a sample size of one.

But we can feel it already- the subtle clamping down of inter-personal variance that occurs every day in our society. Before we can have power over ourselves and our family, we need to convince those already in charge that we are ONE OF THEM. We need to don suits, or (more importantly) close our minds to certain possibilities that we are not supposed to consider. The pressure to conform is real, and it causes our opinions to correlate with dominant opinions (which may or may not be the "normal"). It reduces the effective population size.

We are a social species. We like to copy others and we will always emulate and copy, but that’s why it’s dangerous to have highly centralized social political structures. To have diversity, we need localism, we need freedom to diversify. We need the power to act on our convictions, even if it differs from the dominant view. When we talk about freedom, we need to make it clear: freedom does not mean the freedom to escape poverty, the freedom to have a secure job with health care benefits. Freedom is a function of the total effective population size: the number of independently acting, free human beings in the system. Freedom is the amount of power that is in the hands of independent human individuals. The more we talk about self-reliant, independent people, and not countries, or institutions, the more we are free.

Re-creation

Each of us is in some way trying to retrieve something that was lost- either from childhood or maybe from our deeper evolutionary past. Art, poetry, and song are means of losing one's rational self so we may (re)experience a sense of pure emotion, perfection. The artist and the bird-watcher- even the alcoholic- seek a return to the wilderness- a return to a time when there was no scarcity of food or drink- only orgasmic pleasure, adrenaline rushes, burning hunger, exhaustion.  When humans were wild things, when our emotional, animal nature was all there was. A time when time itself was beyond perception, when pure pleasure - perfection - existed in each moment and each moment reached to infinity. In the real world, we don’t thrive in “wilderness”- “wilderness” can't meet all of our real needs. Wilderness is an abstraction, an esthetic, a figment of our deep subconscious. If it ever really existed. And we didn’t destroy it with our technologies, through wanton exploitation and persecution.  And it wasn't our exploding population that killed the wilderness. We destroyed it with our own emergence into human consciousness. Wilderness was destroyed by our own evolution, by our own coming-out as human. But we continue to try to re-gain our wilderness- sometimes successfully and sometimes less so. Sometimes we fall into drug addiction. Sometimes we put ourselves in mortal peril, recognizing that wilderness lies deep beyond our own humanness, our own physical bodies. But these are the misfits- even the well-adjusted man seeks his wilderness. We all need passion and mystery- we need wilderness, and all men will be led astray. We are all sinners.

This is a poem I wrote down a couple days ago, based on conversations with other members of the Syracuse area underground philosophy society, "Fugue".  Recreation (re-creation) is, in a sense, a form of returning to our primal origins, re-enacting the creation of ourselves, the earth, the universe.

Re-creation.

Prepare to disrobe, pupa-like, from your human trap-pings.
And ask: Where am I? Where are we?
What does the One look like? You know,
The universal hum that we heard over the mountain.
The giver-of-life,
The first invitation, the yawning womb
Long before the earth smelled of love and mushrooms

I try… we try… we are trying…
To stretch our telescopic eyes
To the end, maybe catch the big bang or something.
Or, turning our fiber-optic eyes inward toward some dark bodily interstice, in hopes of
Re-enacting our own gastrulation.

Better late than never!
Everything, every little thing was upside-down, mis-placed, mis-taken
And now we return, shell-less,
Our bones inter-coursing with the rocks, wet with the mist. Or maybe tears.
We are brothers and sisters to Australopithecus! Saber-toothed cats! Trilobites!
Pre-cellular protoplasm!
Extruded, one from the other, like sea-foam.

Lost for words. What words?
We fall down, back in time, blindly, willingly,
Hoping for… 

Some kind of recreation

Just another political/environmental/philosophy/science/poetry blog...

In this blog I will critique the modern environmental movement generally, sometimes harshly, sometimes lovingly, but always respectfully I hope. My arguments will spring from many different fields, including (gasp!) politics, philosophy, poetry, and science. So just to start, here is my basic creed :

Act Locally!
What is an environmentalist to do in the land of the free? Why not follow the old motto of the environmental movement: “Think globally, act locally”. Except forget the “global” part. Just act to protect what you love. Don’t meddle in other people’s business. Don’t force your values down their throats- they are living, breathing, adults just like you are. Practice kindness and respect. Be modest. Don’t pretend that you speak for the animals, the trees, or anything like that. You don’t- you speak only for yourself. Don’t forget that you are only human. Relax- everything will be OK, as long as power isn’t concentrated in the hands of the few.