The Boundary Waters of Chaos

Lost in the roiling, overpowering chaos created and topped every day by the Boss Chaos administration, is a clear and present danger to America's last vestiges of wilderness, its sanctuaries for wildlife, its national forests and even its national parks. It's the stealth threat in a bill that may be voted on in the US Senate this very week.

Using the Congressional Review Act, a previously obscure and dubious catch-all law that has become another favorite of the far right, Republicans in the House recently voted to end the federal ban on mining on protected federal land near the Boundary Waters Wilderness on the northern Minnesota border, noted as the most visited wilderness area in America.   That bill goes to the Senate, and may be up for a vote as early as this week.  By using this Act, passage requires only a majority vote, and not the 60 votes needed to prevent filibuster.  Boss Chaos has promised to sign it into law.

There is already a foreign mining company waiting to begin a copper sulfide operation at the Boundary Waters, the most dangerous form of industrial mining known.  This kind of mining does not have a record of occasionally contaminating nearby waters with toxic pollution; nor a record of often causing it.  According to environmental and political opponents, it has a 100% record of always polluting.  

But it gets worse.  If the bill succeeds by this controversial use of the Congressional Review Act, it is feared that it may establish the precedent to apply to withdrawing protection from every protected area in the country, including those preserved a century or more ago.

In an effort to give myself a break and some distance from the world of Chaos, I've been reading some very long books about other critical moments in which American Presidents actually acted constructively.  I started with two 600+ page books on Franklin D. Roosevelt, including Rightful Heritage by Douglas Brinkley.  That history is about FDR's lesser known efforts on environmental issues, including his expansion of wilderness, bird sanctuaries and other protected areas across the country, as well as new national parks.

FDR grew up with a forest in his backyard.  His first enthusiasms were trees and birds.  He became very knowledgeable about endangered species and habitats, so as President he was very specific in what he wanted accomplished, and where.  Many of his New Deal efforts had the added goal--and added benefit--of healing lands and waters depleted and destroyed by poor farming practices (leading in part to the Dust Bowl) as well as rapacious industries and rampant pollution.  The Civil Conservation Corps was his most conspicuous effort.  

In this he was somewhat following in the footsteps of his famous relative, Theodore Roosevelt (who unlike FDR was a Republican.)  TR is the subject of an earlier book by Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior.  It's even longer--more than 800 pages with nearly 100 more pages of footnotes etc.  I'm about halfway through it now. In the late 19th and early 20th century, TR was an imperialist, Social Darwinist, and by today's standards probably a racist.  He favored using the military to expand US influence in the hemisphere, and he was a proud big game hunter. 

 But he also grew up hands-on in a natural world, and well into his teens his chosen profession was as a scientific naturalist.  He had a fierce intelligence and a scientific bent: Darwin was a hero he actually read.  As an adult he explored mountains, forests, rivers and waterways all over North America, as the great wilderness areas were rapidly being destroyed by railroad, timber and other industrial interests.  Species were going extinct and others seriously threatened--birds in particular were being killed in vast numbers to provide feathers for ladies' hats.  In his public life as President and before, he tenaciously fought all of these interests, fostered regulations on hunting and fishing, put teeth in the protection of federal protected areas, and expanded these wilderness and protected areas to save them for posterity.  As TR saw it, Brinkley writes, "forest management and national greatness were one and the same."

TR accomplished this with popular support by using his celebrity as well as his power and political acumen.  His immense enthusiasm--which may have been partly the product of a bipolar personality--was his greatest asset.

Reading these books really helped in my less inspiring present.  Particularly Rightful Heritage was at times an almost blissful reading experience.  And I took hopeful solace from the outcomes, that these environments, these parks and national monuments, bird and wildlife sanctuaries and wilderness areas were permanent accomplishments.  Whatever else, American would have these.

If only.

I was of course aware of the environmental protections the Chaos administration was dismantling, one by one.  But only recently did I become aware of a frontal assault on these protected lands and waters, beginning with the Boundary Waters. Heather Cox Richardson talked about it recently, and Minnesota Senator Tina Smith has been vocal about it.  I should have known about it, since the fight against this bill in the House was led by our own California district's Member of Congress Jared Huffman, the ranking Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee.  

But I immediately saw the connection with what I'd been reading, the history that seemed a triumph for the good, but that was now being assaulted and endangered.  Not that this is unique these days, but when wilderness is destroyed the next administration can't rebuild it.  

The direct connection I saw to FDR and TR because of this reading was also apparent to the direct descendants of Theodore Roosevelt.  In TR's name, they wrote a letter sounding the alarm on the Boundary Waters issue and related dangers--the first time that all four branches of TR's descendants signed a statement together.  National media by and large has yet to cover this story, but this letter caught the attention of the New York Times. 

The Times story even quotes Douglas Brinkley, author of the FDR and TR books, known as a presidential historian. He observed that "there has never been a President with zero interest in protecting the natural world" until the current one.  (Heather Cox Richardson has written about the letter in some detail, with historical and current context.)

The best summary I found so far of what's gone on with the Boundary Waters bill is this post on Substack, in a column called Public Domain.  Since this is officially the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness, and the very existence of many small canoeing businesses and related businesses in the area are threatened, a publication called Paddle Portage is following the story.  A recent post points out that the first step in the Senate is a ruling by the Senate Parliamentarian as to whether this bill qualifies under the Congressional Review Act, which applies only to "rules" and not "orders," with their technical but very meaningful distinctions.  If she decides it is an "order" then the CRA doesn't apply, and at the very least it will require the full 60 votes, which it is very unlikely to get.  It may in fact stop this measure in its tracks, and even invalidate the House bill.

That decision could come in days, or not for weeks.  Even if the bill passes, there are further steps that must be taken before the mining can begin.  Everything will be subject to law suits and court decisions.  The state of Minnesota can also weigh in with their own prohibitions and protections, though their state legislature is currently closely divided between Democrats and Republicans.  

I've never been to the Boundary Waters (I got as far north in Minnesota as Lake Superior), though my friend Mike went on a canoe trip there some months ago.  I know of it mostly through the descriptions in the novel Solar Storms by Linda Hogan, as a mysterious place with both practical and mystical power to the Native peoples whose ancestors first inhabited it. (This 1995 novel also involves an external environmental threat.)  A recent Minnesota Post article describes the area (with above photo) as "a vast swath of remote woods, lakes and swamps in the Superior National Forest...along the border with Canada...It remains largely untouched by humans."  It is regarded as one of the most important wilderness areas in the US.

Even if the mining effort ultimately fails, the successful use of this obscure Act could ultimately threaten all protected lands and waters, all protected life forms that together define America and its heritage for the future--everything that generations of conservationists, outdoor enthusiasts, ecologists and Presidents from Lincoln forward have worked to protect.  Including and especially TR and FDR.

These Books Matter 2022

 Lots of books are published each year, and many of them contribute in some way: they inform, remember, correct the record, advance a new idea, edify, inspire and/or entertain.  But there are a smaller number of books that matter.

Though what matters can mean different things.  Some books matter because of their consequences over time.  Novels (like plays, movies and songs) can become beloved, or in the overused term, "iconic" or even "classic." Typically they speak to different people in different ways, saying different things to each.  Yet they remain memorable for many, and eventually become cultural touchstones that nearly everyone knows at least a little.  

However, identifying such books is best accomplished years afterwards.  Less time needs to pass perhaps to see a novel's influence in the world.  For example, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future, published almost two years ago,  has clearly become a book that matters.  Not only is it the author's best-selling novel but it has entered into, and in some ways focused, discussions on how to address the climate crisis future, not only in the U.S. but perhaps even more strongly in Europe and internationally.  Richard Powers' two most recent novels, The Overstory and Bewilderment, have also exerted strong responses and focused emotions, inquiry and discussion on a range of related topics: not just forest issues, but questions of what constitutes life and intelligence, and the relationships of humans to the rest of life--what is increasingly called the "more than human world."   

Nonfiction books can perhaps be more easily identified more quickly as books that matter.  Published nearly a decade ago now, Thomas Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is clearly a book that matters.  Applying contemporary economic and historical analysis to very basic questions, Picketty both inspired and coalesced important thinking about basic changes in economic structures needed to make a stable and better future.  Its analysis of the failures of today's economic order and prevailing conservative philosophy, particularly showing the dangers of the huge gaps between the few at the top and everyone else, has become influential even to approaches less radical than Picketty might favor, such as a simple return to the Keynesian economics that prevailed in the U.S. from FDR until Reagan.  That analysis which shows that prosperity is attained by supporting the middle class and public sector investment is becoming U.S. policy again under the Biden administration, in what journalist Michael Tomasky is calling Middle-Out Economics, the title of his new book: perhaps a candidate for a book that matters. (In the meantime, this Politico piece and interview is a good summary.)

But books can matter before their influence is measured simply by being crucial contributions on crucial topics. They are groundbreaking in important ways, though not necessarily unique.  Their importance depends as well on how riveting they are to read.  I have several candidates for books that matter on this basis, published in the past year or so.  It's not an exhaustive list; perhaps the minimum.  The order in which I present them does not imply rank.  What links them is that they present in a generous if not full way a dramatically new synthesis that tells us something startling about our world that upends conventional wisdom and offers a new framework for perceiving and acting in the world.  In that sense, they bring the news.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Published towards the end of last year, this book is already influencing newer work.  Its scope is enormous: nothing less than the human story.  The linear story of development (or evolution of society) is a comfortable one for many reasons.  It simplifies textbook categories, and it leads logically and inevitably to contemporary "advanced" societies, the apex of it all: from caveman to capitalism.  Who loves this story?  The same type folks who extracted "Social Darwinism" from the complexities of Darwinian evolution.  Robber barons like John D. Rockerfeller and Andrew Carnegie saw that it was good, and gave it their monied blessings.

According to the two Davids, both archaeologists, the story is wrong, right from the beginning. Modern humans weren't the sole apex of evolution--other humanoids had real societies, too, with all the elements of intelligence and expression.  We carry some of their genes. 

Society did not develop or even change from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to urban.  All these forms coexisted and intermingled, and there were many hybrids.  There were urban societies without kings or rulers, and tyrannical hunter-gatherers.  The Davids may be a little judgey in their descriptions of the varieties of Native (North and South) American societies, but they make their point--they were not simple or primitive or identical; they were often sophisticated, complex, various and sometimes large.  

This book emphasized an historical point that has since been taken up by others: that the form of democracy that governed the Six Nations Confederacy (the Haudenosaunee) that lasted longer than our democracy has so far, was patiently explained to Benjamin Franklin and others by some of its leaders, and informed the formation of the non-Native American democracy.  Too bad it didn't also adopt the Prime Directive of the  Haudenosaunee: in all decisions take into account the seventh generation to come.

This book of 692 pages is replete with examples, written with verve and wit, so it can read like a wonder book.  We don't really need Marvel or the other purveyors of outsized fantasies:  it's there in the histories that have either only recently discovered or studied, or conveniently ignored because they complicate or contradict the main story--the one that has gone a long way towards the fix we're in, on the brink of destroying it all.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

by Ed Yong 

In Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory, the character that most readers noted and remembered is a woman scientist who discovers that trees in a forest communicate with each other, and help each other chemically to ward off disease.  She is ridiculed by scandalized scientists and forced out of academia until her research is vindicated, and she becomes a kind of folk hero.

 This character is based on a real life researcher, Suzanne Simard, whose book Finding the Mother Tree subsequently became popular.  But even more popular was a book on the same theme published a few years earlier by forester Peter Wohlleben, with the more arresting title The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate.

 That book’s success, expanding on revelations about the complex life of the forest, led to a series of similar books by Wohlleben and many others, with titles often beginning with “The Hidden Life of” or “The Secret Life of” various animals, plants and other natural phenomena, including ice.  These books reflected new research but also observations that had gone unnoticed or derided because they contradicted established views on the natural world as comprised of simple if sometimes mysterious living objects, of interest mostly as exploitable for human ends.

 All of this helped prepare readers for the June 2022 publication of An Immense World by the much praised science journalist Ed Yong. It turns out that everything has a life hidden to humans, partly because our current preconceptions block awareness, but also because other lifeforms experience the world in vastly different ways.

 The key concept here is umwelt, named by early 20^th century zoologist Jakob von Uexkull.  It refers to the sensory world of animals, determined by what senses they have and what they can do.  As Yong demonstrates through scientists he visits, these vary considerably.  Some creatures taste with their feet, others hear ultrasound or see into the ultraviolet. They may sense electromagnetic waves.

   Senses that we share with other animals are used in different ways, and the balance among them can be radically different.  Dogs smell and hear better than they see—so their world is one of aroma trails.  Even their color vision is different, and one of the more startling illustrations in this book compares the colors in a typical room that we see, and how dogs see them.

Though sometimes based on dismissed and forgotten insights, most of the research is new, as scientists use new technologies to dispel old assumptions.  That birds can’t smell is one of them, but there are many more.  Some of these discoveries are astonishing:  for instance, the vocalizations and communication that goes on out of human hearing range.  We can detect only a fraction of whales’ songs, and it turns out that mice sing to each other.  At some points this book starts to sound like Douglas Adams’ humorous takes in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (that mice actually run experiments on humans, that dolphins can escape human catastrophe) may have more substance than expected.

 Apart from the wondrous details, there are larger points here.  Humans assumed a lot about other life based on their own sensorium, but we’ve missed quite a lot.  “Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way.  To us, it feels all-encompassing.  It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know.  This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.”

 But science and other forms of observation at the service of human imagination can help us see not only some of the ways other lifeforms live and communicate, but how our own activities disrupt their lives.  Light pollution wreaks havoc on various birds and other animals; noise pollution in the oceans endangers whales and other sea creatures.  

Despite the book's length, Yong's precise but informal voice and his flourishes of wit make it eminently readable, yet the science reporting itself is admirable. Even the footnotes are interesting reading. It helps that what the science is reporting remains continuously fascinating. 

 This research has greatly complicated human conceptions of what other lifeforms are, and expands the notions, extent and range of sentience and intelligence. It is this theme that James Bridle takes up in his book.

 Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for Planetary Intelligence

By James Bridle 

Bridle writes and thinks chiefly about technologies, and his disquiet about the direction and limitations of artificial intelligence sent him to explore other kinds of intelligences in the natural world.

 Again, the concept of Umwelt is evoked. Bridle also refers to both Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as starting points for his own explorations.  He ranges far and wide, from our humanoid ancestors to the intelligence of slime mold, and applies his observations to the new machines.  “The idea of forming new relationships with non-human intelligence is the central theme of this book,” he writes.  “It emanates from a wider and deeper dawning: the increasingly evident and pressing reality of our utter entanglement with the more-than-human world.”

 Bridle’s cogent and provocative musings apply not only to the possible futures of machine intelligence but, as Yong’s book does, to the endangered life of this planet and the necessity to actively preserve it.  As we discover and admit the extent of intelligent life and its beautiful complexity, we are close to destroying it.

 The singular and expressive organization of information and the inspired insights more than compensate for some slackness and an editorial lapse or two. Bridle's ideas and their expression in this book merit serious attention.

This recent run of books on non-human life, culminating so far in Yong and Bridle, should end any credibility given to the traditional notion of animals as natural automatons, important only as they are useful to humans, with no feelings to consider or intelligence to respect and learn from.  Gaia expanded the definition of life, and now we grapple with kinds of intelligence not only in familiar animals but plants, microbes and other life. We'd better start learning.

 One of the ideas that Bridle interrogates is the notion promoted by digital industries and other enthusiasts that intelligence is primarily based on calculation.  That is a theme in the latest novel by Dave Eggers.

 The Every: Or At Last A Sense of Order, Or The Final Days of Free Will, or Limitless Choice is Killing The World

A novel by Dave Eggers 

The Hollywood pitch for this novel might be Alice in Wonderland meets Nineteen Eighty-Four, or perhaps Brave New World would be a closer match to its onrushing dystopia.

 In this stand-alone sequel to Eggers’ The Circle, the Facebook-like corporation has merged with Amazon (referred to here as the Jungle) to form a monopolistic continuum, not only of business, not only of culture, but of shared reality.  Welcome to The Every.

 Delaney is a young woman intent on destroying The Every from the inside.  She is intelligent, intuitive, creative and acutely observant, but the plot hinges on her also being repeatedly naïve about the outcome of her efforts, as she proposes a series of outrageous changes that turn out to be big hits with The Every users, which seems to include Everyone.

 Eggers is not shy about stating his theme early in the novel: “the war on subjectivity.”  Everything is objectified to decision by calculation. (This includes the maximum number of allowable pages in a readable novel, which is 577—as it happens, the exact length of this book.) Ironically this also results in the disappearance of actual objects and authentic life, in favor of digital imagery and ideological judgments.  The result is a society caught in self-referential stasis, that punishes difference. 

 The novel does not fall easily into political categories. It exposes corporate conformism, but also its effect of cancel culture. The reasons (or excuses) given for much of the social pressure to conform are to save the environment and promote social justice.

 Delaney is a former forest ranger, so it may have seemed natural to her to organize an outing of The Every employees to visit Pacific Coast seals, but it was a disaster from start to finish, especially when they were confronted with the realities of these animals and their lives.  This incident is outrageously exaggerated and yet totally believable, and ultimately dystopic, especially given what these previous books tell us.

 It’s also funny, as is the novel generally, in a Dr. Strangelove sort of way. It has some characteristics of a satire of a monomanical corporate culture becoming a monoculture at large. Delaney’s best friend and fellow skeptic is the first to succumb to The Every’s embrace, supplying a horror movie vibe (think Invasion of the Body Snatchers.)  Delaney’s own fate involves a confrontation with the head of The Every, who was the naïve young woman protagonist of The Circle.

 There are many other related issues raised in the novel, in an entertaining narrative context that feels real right now.  The story is in development for a TV series, but right now this is a book that matters.

These four books matter because they give us crucial new information that creates a new context of how we see the world, our society and ourselves.  Right now there is no more important context that the relationship of humanity to the rest of life, and secondarily to the digital life humans are creating (for if we don't solve the survival problems associated with the first, the second won't much matter.)  They are robust enough to generate further discussion, and they cry out for action. 

A Better Metaphor

 People made machines that worked, and then made the machines into metaphors to explain how everything works.

 For example, the metaphor of the clock. It dominated the long era of Newtonian mechanics.  Everything became clockworks.

 Then the steam engine, the dynamo, and so on. The mindless machine and the Industrial Revolution is said to have called forth a mechanistic theory of evolution from Wallace and Darwin.

 In my 1950s childhood the human brain and body was a telephone exchange.  Then came calculating machines, and the brain became a computer.  A biological analogue was supposed to be the gene, with its digital off/on switch. It ran the whole show, even of change over millions of years called evolution.

 Once these images became less novel and dominant, the points where the metaphor didn’t hold became clearer.  Genetics turned out to be more complex, as did evolution.  And not even a telephone exchange is a telephone exchange anymore.

 Then in the 1970s, Gregory Bateson suggested a model which as a metaphor seems to explain a lot that’s left out of these other metaphors.  For these other metaphors were based on insights and techniques that enabled humans to do things.  Because they enabled humans to do things, they must be the keys to reality. But while they increased our capabilities, they did not necessarily complete our understanding, though these metaphors were seldom recognized as limited or partial.

 Bateson’s metaphor was also a kind of machine, one of deceptive simplicity.  It was the humble thermostat. 

The familiar thermostat includes three basic components: a thermometer that measures ambient temperature (for instance, in a room or a house), a dial or other device that a person uses to set a desired temperature, and an internal device that makes use of the different thermal properties of two metals to sense the difference between the desired temperature and the measured temperature.  When the actual falls below the desired, the device turns on the heat, and shuts it off when the two are approximately the same.

 What the thermostat achieves is homeostasis, which sounds like it means a stable home, and it almost does mean that.  Homeostasis is defined as a process to actively maintain fairly stable conditions. It is most often applied to life.

 When French physiologist Claude Bernard studied human internal organs and processes in the late nineteenth century, he theorized that they helped the body maintain a range of stability necessary for health and survival.  As this idea was confirmed in other studies, in the 20^th century this became known as homeostasis.

 Since then the principle of homeostasis was found to operate in other life forms.  Trees for example do their best to grow straight up, because they survive best that way.  If they get bent by wind or other forces, they do their best to compensate.

 So homeostasis is basic to life and evolution.  There are other tendencies such as competition, predation and procreation, and the natural cycles of growth and decay.  But homeostasis is the fundamental job—not competition or dominance. 

 Bateson used the thermostat model to make a couple of points.  In order to operate, the thermostat uses information, and that information is based on sensing a difference—in this case, the difference between the actual and desired temperatures.  Because it senses difference and responds to it, the thermostat operates as a system.  Those internal organs do the same thing—they respond to information of difference.  In the world outside machines, a system that senses difference and makes changes in response is called life.

 Bateson made his observations in the 1970s, working from insights derived from systems theory—called cybernetics—developed in the 1940s.  Also in the 1970s, scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela worked out their theory based on the self-regulating and self-organizing systems of life maintaining homeostasis—they called it autopoiesis (self-making.)

 In the 1960s, NASA had asked an atmospheric chemist to study the atmosphere of Mars, to help them figure out methods for an upcoming space mission to determine if there was life on Mars.  James Lovelock compared the Martian atmosphere to the planet where he knew life existed for sure: the Earth.  He quickly concluded that Mars could only be lifeless. Its atmosphere was static, dead. But why was the mix of chemicals in Earth’s atmosphere so dynamic, and so conducive to life?   

One answer was that crucial gases for life like oxygen were manufactured by lifeforms (plants mostly), and other gases were also expelled by the life they helped exist.  The Earth was a self-organized, self-regulating system, that kept the atmosphere in a zone of stability, which in turn kept life thriving.  The planet was in this sense itself alive, cumulatively taking in information and making adjustments to keep itself alive.  Lovelock’s friend, the novelist William Golding, suggested he call it the Gaia hypothesis, after the Greek goddess.

 Gregory Bateson, who lived just long enough to read Lovelock’s first book on Gaia, had already concluded that all life on the planet lived in profound mutual dependent relationship (“the pattern which connects”), or inter-dependency.  Life is a system.  He called it Eco. 

 Lovelock’s initial hypothesis was just an outline, until he met biologist Lynn Margulis, a pioneer in the study of microorganisms like bacteria and forms of fungi.  She could tell him what gases these organisms produced that cumulatively added to the atmospheric mix for life.  Lovelock had the “what” and “why” of Gaia; Margulis had the “how.”

In the decades since, the study of small and obscure organisms has flourished.  We now know astonishing things, such as the gases produced by algae produce clouds over the ocean which regulate global temperature.

 But Margulis and those who followed her are also showing the role of symbiosis and cooperation in life, right down to the level of the cell.  They have changed the accepted story of evolution.  Further, they have demonstrated another level of interdependence—how forests are impossible without fungi, and the human body could not function without bacterias and other microorganisms that live on and within it in symbiotic partnership.  This discovery in particular casts serious doubts on the ability of human beings to survive anywhere but on Earth, pretty much as it is. 

 The more that is learned about the natural world, the clearer it is that life on Earth exists because of a great diversity of intricately interdependent lifeforms and environments.

  At least metaphorically, Gaia works like a global thermostat; Gaia and Eco are systems of systems of systems, and they thrive by organizing and regulating themselves on the formative principle of homeostasis.

 Homeostasis on this comprehensive scale turns out to be the basis for some of the world’s oldest religious beliefs, going back well before civilization. Surviving indigenous beliefs around the world (and perhaps a few more recent systems such as Buddhism) agree that all life is sacred.  Gregory Bateson called this “the sacred unity.” 

These beliefs go beyond Bateson to include what he classified as non-living (while scientific study of exotic life since the 70s has blurred the defined borders between life and non-living.)  They say that everything is sacred.  That is what I believe. Everything is sacred.  The Buddhist principle of ahimsa—which Gary Snyder interprets as meaning “do the least possible harm”—applies to everything.  Everything contributes to the sacred unity, the homeostasis of the planet, and therefore deserves respect. What we do that may harm anything requires individual consideration, attention, intention and respect.

 Homeostasis is dynamic; it does not mean the absence of change, for life always encompasses change, including death, which breaks down one system and adds to others.  All the perennial mysteries and apparent contradictions still apply, within the sacred process of homeostasis.

 In cybernetics, the cycle of sensing information and then responding to it by making changes was called feedback. The technical definitions are quite different from how the word is used informally, but basically there are two kinds of systems theory feedback—the kind that supports homeostasis and continued life, and the kind that is a “vicious circle” or “vicious cycle”—that pushes towards instability.  The most prominent and powerful example of that is the need for continual growth that uses up non-renewable resources.  In other words, capitalism, and the mind-set that ignores its consequences and rationalizes it, even deifying it. 

 The ideology of today’s capitalism, and the power of those institutions and individuals that keep it dominant, is based in part on outdated beliefs in the always-independent single unit of life (right down to the selfish gene), the natural primacy of selfishness, the goal of “progress” at any cost, and winner-and-losers competition as the basic principles of life and evolution.  This results in the vicious cycle of infinite growth using up finite resources, of one lifeform destroying what sustains it and all other lifeforms.

 In practice, probably those who benefit most from this ideology in the short term don’t care what its foundations or metaphors are, or what it implies and causes.  But their institutionalized power helps explain why the insights of systems thinking, and the principle of homeostasis, have remained obscure for many decades.  This dominant ideology has so far blocked society from conscious commitment to planetary homeostasis.

 The outcome of these beliefs and practices of exploitation—never considering the destruction of the composition, diversity and natural relationships of life and environments as a cost, let alone a limitation or a suicidal act on the largest scale possible—is the Earth as we know it on the edge of doom—possibly even as the only living planet in the universe we know of.  

Today, 96% of the mammal biomass on the planet is comprised of human beings and our food animals.  Less than 30% of the wild animal population in 1970 exists today. Humans have destroyed mammal and marine biomass by a factor of 6, and half the plant biomass. Other lifeforms are severely depleted, including insects. The relatively sudden and severe jump in global temperature is on track to scour most of the livable land and perhaps water as well. Many scientists conclude we are entering a mass extinction event, perhaps larger than the previous five in the Earth’s long history. 

  Just as Gaia’s homeostasis is being crippled by the excess of greenhouse gases that are leading to the triggering of vicious cycles in the climate, other results of exploitation and untrammeled growth such as the destruction of habitat for animals and plants, the pollution and acidification of the oceans, are pushing Eco beyond its abilities to self-regulate, to heal, to maintain homeostasis.  The vicious cycle of a cooked climate could continue its dire effects for hundreds of thousands of years, not only destroying the current homeostasis, but casting in doubt the planet’s ability to recover enough for life to flourish ever again.  Earth could become Mars.

 Has our species developed consciousness just so we can be aware of what we’ve done and not done, of what we are doing, and not doing?  And what the consequences will be?  Or can consciousness still be a thermostat, that understands the information and acts on it to restore homeostasis, to preserve the Earth and all that is sacred and sustaining?

Addendum: Native Paradigm in Flight

While broad concepts of Indigenous knowledge or the Native Paradigm translate into languages spoken in contemporary civilizations, a lot of detail, resonance and meaning is lost from the original language and culture.  Unfortunately, many Indigenous languages are themselves extinct, and many others are on the brink. 

 So we can generalize and say that Indigenous peoples live in deep relationship to the rest of nature, but what does that mean in detail, in specifics?

 One of the best examples I’ve run across recently is in an article on the BBC Future site by the aptly named Jim Robbins, author of The Wonder of Birds, about the various functions of local legends and stories about birds in local languages in Papua New Guinea. 

 Birds are a major element of the ecology, and Steven Feld, an anthropologist who had studied the Bosavi peoples for more than a quarter century, suggests what “deep relationship” to nature means in their lives:

" And while we may enjoy the trill of bird song, the Bosavi hear in the songs of 125 species near their village, a richly detailed ecological portrait. "They instantly know the time of day, the season of the year, what layer of the forest canopy the bird is in, what fruits are in season, soil acidity changes, the knowledge of the migratory situation, who's nesting where.

"Listening becomes a science journal, a system for sensing on an everyday basis and putting into memory all of the diagnostics we would be writing down or using equipment to measure," says Feld. "It's a deep science."

It can be so deep that it goes beyond our typical means of knowing:

" Felice Wyndham, an ethnoornithologist and ethnobotanist who works on the EWA project, says peoples she has worked with have the ability to move their consciousness out of their body and intimately sense the world, which she called a "heightened form of mindfulness".

"It's quite common, you see it in most hunter-gatherer groups," she says. "If you are in a highly diverse and sensuous natural environment, you are also going to be doing that with all of the organisms, the plants, the water and the birds – especially the birds – because they fly and it gives you a completely different perspective."   

Intimate knowledge preserved in local languages has practical application beyond the locality.  “A recent study found, for instance, that most of the Indigenous knowledge about medicinal plants in North America, northwest Amazonia, and New Guinea are to be found in one language in each of the regions."

 When ornithologists studying tribes  “realised that these cultures related to birds in vastly different ways than our own and in studying biology they were getting only a small, distorted picture of a rich, ancient and holistic relationship that had evolved over thousands of years,” the discipline of ethnoornithology was born.  Now there is an ongoing, online Ethnoornithology World Atlas, to which Indigenous peoples contribute. 

  That languages and the species those languages speak about are both going extinct together is not just coincidence.  Without the value placed in these species by those languages, humans aren’t motivated to save either the birds or the bird stories.

 Andrew Gosler, the research director of the Ethnoornithology World Atlas, teaches at the University of Oxford. "Half of our first-year students in biology can't name five British birds and 20% can't name one," says Gosler. "That's a common story across the world."

Yet, he says, one 19th century study showed that there were 78 songbird species in England that once had 7,000 folk names. "When those names vanished common local knowledge about their biology and behaviour went with them.”

A Swiss linguist in his 90s has gathered more than 100,000 folk names in many languages for 600 species of birds throughout Europe. “Every valley once had its own name for the same birds. They say a huge amount about how people related to birds across Europe for thousands of years," says Gosler.    ' "As natural experiences dwindle an emotional investment in protecting nature goes with it – that may be part of why birds are in steep decline."

"When you say to students 'Did you know that this species has declined 70% in the UK?' it means nothing to them," Gosler says. "They say 'Why should I care? I didn't know that bird existed until you told me.'"

But as they hear the bird folk knowledge of Britain or hold a bird with fluttering wings in their hand to band it, he says, "it is a life-changing experience for them. Then they care."  

Earth Day Past, Earth Future

I was in upstate New York on the first Earth Day, fifty years ago.  I heard Ralph Nader speak at SUNY Buffalo.  There were speeches and marches and huge gatherings everywhere. Some 20 million marched that first Earth Day, about one in ten Americans. "This is the major thing that turned Nixon around, scared the hell out of him," Ralph Nader said recently, quoted in the New York Times.

  I had a conversation with an auto mechanic, about a national civil conservation corps to turn anti-pollution, recycling and other environmental efforts into new jobs and careers.  "Now you're getting me interested," he said.

We were young and angry and idealistic, sometimes ridiculous and worse, and we were right.

Five years before Earth Day 1970, the word "ecology" as it is now used was mostly unknown. After that Earth Day, the US got a cabinet department devoted to the "environment," another new concept, followed by state level departments that had to take into account that "environment" was more than natural resources for industrial exploitation and profit.  The first major environmental legislation, like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, were enacted, and the states followed with their new laws.

I've marked Earth Days on this and a couple of other blogs nearly every year since 2004.  (I've gone back and added an Earth Day label to the ones on this blog.) That first essay in 2004 quoted another enviro veteran, James Speth, co-founder on the National Resource Council in his then-new book Red Sky At Morning, on the climate crisis: "If I were a young person being handed this problem by indulgent predecessors, I would be angry."

The young of 1970 are old, and the young of 2004 are middle-aged. The young of today are angry, and are again at the forefront of agitating for action to address the climate crisis effectively.  One of the latest protest themes is holding a "Funeral for Our Future."

It's familiar in that it's dramatic and eye-catching and involves dressing up.  It also seems to me to be both realistic and defeatist.  The young of the past did what we could against power we underestimated.  But now 7 in 10 Americans, the last holdouts on the planet, know the climate crisis is a serious threat to civilization and the planet.

Yes, it may well be too late.  It almost certainly is too late to prevent some substantial damage to the planet as a whole, as well as many terrible effects that have happened, are happening and will happen, from fires and floods to massive species extinctions.

So a funeral is warranted, in a couple of ways.  If people expected a future much like the present, with current levels of consumption and an unlimited capitalistic economy, that was never going to survive.  If the future that people expected involved the natural world as it is today--or perhaps as it was a few decades ago--then that, very sadly, even horribly, is unlikely.

But there is likely to be some sort of future for the younger generation, and it is time to get ahead of what it might be like.  Yes, absolutely, they must advocate for policies that might forestall the worse consequences of a deformed climate, which include the end of human civilization and the Earth as we know it.  But that's only one important task.

At this late date change on the scale necessary is unlikely, but possible.  This historical moment, during which there will be no demonstrations but which shows how quickly everything can be transformed (in this case by a virus pandemic), suggests that bigger and faster change can happen, and that bigger and more change could be quickly on the way.

There are pitfalls and gambles.  Incremental changes have been made, a lot of things are better (air and water got cleaner, we saved the whales) but things also got more complicated, and lots of things got way, way worse.  Big change usually takes a long time, and comes after many defeats, and I still believe that it's better not to make the perfect the enemy of the good.

President Obama took a chance, after his proposal for cap and trade on carbon emissions failed in Congress, to concentrate on securing the Paris Agreements, the first global commitment, not just to address the climate crisis, but to do anything on a planetary scale.  But with Trump's election, that gamble failed, at least for the moment.  President Obama knew it was just a foot in the door for what was truly needed.  Now we've slipped back instead of moving forward, and lost perhaps crucial years.

On the other hand, President Obama gambled on investing in clean energy technology as part of the Great Recession's Recovery Act, and that has paid off spectacularly.  Now clean energy is economically healthier than fossil fuel, and poised for greater growth.

I'd been deeply interested in the climate crisis since 1989, and I've been researching it and writing about it--in print and on the Internet--for at least 30 years.  For many of those years, the consensus was that it was not too late to successfully stop it, but urgent action was required.  But by 2010--and you can see this reflected in my Earth Day post of that year on this blog--I sensed a change, summarized by Bill McKibben's book Eaarth that the planet wasn't going to escape destructive change.  But urgent action could prevent worse.

Ten years later some things have been done and are planned, but mostly that action hasn't happened.  In a 2017 essay and a 2019 book (The Uninhabitable Earth), David Wallace-Wells wrote of the acceleration of climate crisis causing emissions and other phenomena.  He expressed his shock at learning that more than half the CO2 that humans have deposited in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels was emitted not just in the past 50 years but in the last 25.  "That means we have burned more fossil fuels since the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change than in all the centuries before," he said in an interview.  "So we have done more damage knowingly than we ever managed in ignorance."

  Now some are saying it's still possible to avert the worst in the far future, but the change has to be much larger and faster.The energy of the young can be the tip of the advocacy for that.  They must also advocate for closing the gap between the rich and the poor, so-called income inequality, as key to any future.

 But the young need also to prepare for their own future, and the climate governing the world in which they live will not be much affected by any changes now.  Their climate is already in the cards.  (A less polluted world however would certainly help, as well as a re-wilding one.)

What they can be doing for their future now is investigating what occupations and careers are going to be most needed and most useful in dealing with that climate and its effects, from research to public health, and seeing where their talents and passions lie, while they also advocate for change.  If they dwell on not being able to consume as much, or to be as likely to live as they've been told is the good life or the American Dream, then their lives will be awful, and they may wind up feeling like many of those attracted to Trump today.

But if they shift into seeing life as service, as being useful, as expressing love, and protecting and nurturing what life they can as their personal commitment, then they don't need to feel either despair or hope.  If they see their life's work as a vocation and not a career, they can enact hope, by what they do and how they do it.

"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world," said Vaclav Havel. It is "an ability to work for something because it is good."

And I would go farther: Hope is not a feeling. Hope is a commitment.  It isn't about the future.  It is about the present moment.

So perhaps on this Earth Day, instead of only a funeral for their future, and the mourning that comes with it, there might be the outlines of a rebirth.  The young are going to have to live in the world as it will be.  They can change some things about it, but mostly they can change how they will be within the world.  There may be temptations to overwhelming anger and despair, as well as to factionalism, scapegoating, discrimination and violence in a harder world.  It will not be an easier world, though perhaps in some ways a simpler one. Perhaps they will be given the opportunity for a greater nobility.  

Dreaming Up Daily Quote: Wendell Berry

--Wendell Berry

Can't say I agree with everything he says, but this profile at the Nation (from whence comes the above illustration) provides perspective on an admirable life.

The Overstory Of Our Time Is Singing

Congratulations to Richard Powers and The Overstory, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

 It's a significant achievement, not only for the author (who in my opinion should have won for The Time of Our Singing in 2004) but for fiction that takes the world seriously--that is, the world beyond urban relationships, beyond only human relationships to other humans. It may be too late to make the crucial difference, but if there is time to avert the end of life as we know it, the importance of human relationship to other life must be acknowledged.

Here's a link to my review posted in October 2018.

P.S. What a deceptive cover line, though.  Although Powers has won the National Book Award, it wasn't for this book.  But they'll probably be changing the paperback cover about now.

The Recycling Betrayal

There was this hopeful moment--beginning in the 70s and sweeping through the 80s--that Americans not only recognized the damage and the danger, but were willing to do something about it.

The waste that was piling up and poisoning the future was the country's latest harvest of shame.  Environmentalists preached the solution, and, beginning small but soon reaching big cities across the country, recycling became a part of civic and family life.

Techniques were created to recycle paper and cardboard, glass and certain metals and plastics, so they weren't piling up for centuries at the edge of town.  I remember when recycling was about to come to the city of Pittsburgh, and one of the local papers scoffed.  This was the throwaway society, it would never work.

 I wrote an oped that said: but it will, if for no other reason than recycling revives an ethic common to my grandparents and parents generations of working people, especially recent immigrants.  It was thrift and avoiding waste.  Recycling and reusing was simply part of life in the 1930s, and it was patriotic duty in the war years of the 1940s.

When the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania wanted to promote recycling, I proposed a Pennsylvanian's slogan from the 18th century: Waste not, want not.  In the end, it's the same idea.

People did recycle in Pittsburgh, and though it has taken longer in some places, it's now pretty standard.   Except that the whole idea is being betrayed.

When we arrived in Arcata in the 90s, we separated recyclables and hauled them to the recycling center, where I placed them in the proper bins.  A few cars might be lined up at the entrance, but the exercise wasn't bad and you saw people you knew, you met people, you recycled together--it was a community thing.  And if you wanted, afterwards you could park and browse for recycled hardware, and later a kind of thrift shop was added.  There were even piles of books that weren't deemed saleable, free for a period before they got pulped.  This was instant recycling.

You could get a little money back for recycling cans and bottles and a few other things, but basically, you were doing your duty to the environment, the future, and for the health of the community.

Then, like big cities, Arcata got curbside recycling, handled by the same company that handled the garbage. Now you not only didn't get any cash, you pay a monthly fee, which is pretty much mandatory.  The recycling centers soon closed, which made it harder to recycle things like batteries and other material not suitable for the recycling bins--paper, glass, certain plastics and metals.

That was the start. Recycling became a for-fee business.  I really began to smell a rat when the garbage company announced "single stream recycling."  That was so clearly bullshit that I wonder anybody bought into it at all.  Single stream recycling is just three words for one, which is "garbage."

Now we're learning just what bullshit this is.  Once recycling was a matter of business rather than environmental responsibility, it turns out "recycling" meant: send it all to China.

Not my idea of recycling.  And now China doesn't want the stuff.

So what happens?  In some communities, the garbage companies are a little too obvious.  They're burning it, sending toxic fumes into neighborhoods.

Recycling is therefore just about over. Plenty of pretty logos and slogans, but essentially it seems to be dying if not dead already, surviving as a still profitable scam. We're just putting trash into two containers instead of one.

There are at least two reasons for all of this.

The first is that somebody decided that recycling had to be a profit-making business, and when it was no longer profitable, it couldn't be done.  Who decided that?  The cost of recycling should be part of the cost of the packaging we use--it's all the same process, and the same product.  Recycling is a public good and should be subsidized when prices are down.

The second is that recycling was not supposed to be a single solution, let alone the only solution.  The mantra originally was "Reduce, reuse, recycle."  But apart from some efforts on plastic bags and straws, we didn't reduce waste, and we don't reuse as much as we could.  Recycle is the third option, and even when it works, it can't do it alone.

We lost the reason why we need to recycle.  In the 80s and 90s in particular, people were aware that they needed to buy recycled products if recycling was going to work.  Grocery stores and big boxes like Costco sold recycled paper products (toilet paper, paper towels) in green packaging.  You can't find these at our Costco anymore.  Other places, including big box business supply stores, sold recycled printer paper, legal pads and so on.  They often had special sections with recycled products.  I haven't seen that for a decade or more.

These products were the bare minimum, the beginning.  Once recycled paper was available, there was no excuse, economic or otherwise, for cutting down trees to make toilet paper.  But we never moved forward, developing new products for the mass market, or at least non-rich consumers. And now we've retreated.

Actual effort should be made, and actual money spent, to promote recycled products.  Any business trying to create a market does that, but more to the point, the public needs to know why recycling and recycled products are important.

Clearly recycling wasn't doing the entire job--immense quantities of plastics and other trash made their way into the oceans and into the ground.  But instead of expanding the reach of recycling--into textiles for instance--and researching new ways to recycle plastics and so on, we just dropped the ball.  Seduced by seeming convenience, we left it up to monopoly businesses.

To me the most horrifying fact I've read that was revealed in David Wallace-Wells' new book about the climate crisis is that (in the words I quoted from the Guardian summary) "we've done more damage to the environment since...1992 than we did in all the millennia that preceded it."

It was one thing to be ruining the life of the planet unknowingly.  It's quite another to have once recognized it, actually devised something like a solution, and then never done it, or stopped short of doing it right.

 Meanwhile, populations have grown, consumption has grown, life in the deepest and most remote areas of the oceans is choking on plastic while huge expanses of waste the size of states poison the seas.

We have no excuses anymore.  If this makes you feel guilty, too bad.  We are guilty.

The Chain of Extinction

"Save the Whales" became the most successful environmental campaign, when the Blue Whale, humpback whales and other whale species were threatened with imminent extinction.  The polar bear has likewise become the icon of the climate crisis.  It still faces likely extinction.

The Earth is undergoing what scientists consider the sixth mass extinction in the planet's known lifetime.  Normally, just one amphibian species goes extinct every thousand years.  Now it may be as many as 45,000.  And extinction rates among "many other groups" (writes Elizabeth Kolbert in her 2014 book The Sixth Extinction) "are approaching amphibian levels."

There are different contributing reasons for various groups and species, though humans are most often the final cause.  The climate crisis is the greatest overall threat but there are many others.

As human civilization cuts itself off from daily contact with the rest of life, all this goes on almost invisibly.  So one question is, which of the potentially iconic animals (or plants) will go extinct first, and shake some sense into us (for however long it last)?  The great apes?  Tigers?  Polar bears?

There's a new candidate now, which suggests an ominous problem for the near future.  That species is the Monarch butterfly.  The annual count in California, where the western Monarchs winter, was down 86% from the previous year.  This represents a 99.4 percent decline since the 1980s, and an all-time low for the Pacific Coast.  The population is below 1% of what it once was.

The more numerous Eastern Monarchs that winter in Mexico, also showed more than a 90% drop since 1996.  There used to be billions of them.

The Western Monarchs wintering in Marin County were estimated at some 10 million butterflies.  The population is now less than 1% of what it was. Scientists suggest that once it drops below 30,000 butterflies, the species is headed for certain extinction.  It is very close.

If it occurs, the Monarch extinction will be due to particular circumstances that are part of a general trend: pesticides, loss and fragmentation of habitat, and effects of global heating.  Butterflies are among sensitive species and sites that are specifically threatened by the proposed Wall on the southern US border.

 And new studies show the butterflies are not alone.  A much-ignored February headline:Insect numbers are collapsing around the world, which could cause the "catastrophic collapse of nature's ecosystems" and threaten "the survival of mankind".

"More than 40 percent of insect species are declining - and the rate of extinction is about eight times faster than that affecting birds, mammals and reptiles. Based on current trends, insects could be extinct within a century.

Insects make up two-thirds of all life on earth by number. They pollinate plants, enrich our soil, and provide food for larger animals in the food chain. Their loss would be devastating to both agriculture and the environment."

Or as Edward O. Wilson succinctly put it, these are "the little things that run the world."

This analysis of data collected in 27 studies fingers the usual suspects: habitat destruction, pesticides and the climate crisis.  In both habitat destruction and pesticides, the prominent culprit is industrial agriculture.

A member of the European Parliament's agriculture committee succinctly explains why this continues:

"What might accurately be dubbed insectageddon is being driven by the agrichemicals industry. This situation is compounded by compliant politicians and policymakers who fall prey to lobbying pressure and then refuse to implement science-driven policy to protect wildlife. This has meant that over the past five decades conventional farmers have forgotten the natural systems they once relied on to control pests. Non-organic agricultural systems are highly dependent on chemicals, so feeding a vicious circle."

This is no longer a matter of family farmers spraying a harmful pesticide.  It is saturation on industrial scale.  In his 2012 book Apocalyptic Planet, Craig Childs describes exploring an industrial cornfield in Iowa where he saw no living thing other than corn.  This method kills pests but also life forms that replenish the soil.  Soon not even corn will grow here.

The growth of GMO agriculture is part of this death spiral.  A serious mistake is made when scientists and others lump together anti-GMO advocates with climate crisis deniers as examples of "anti-science" superstition.  The safety of genetically modified food is only part of the issue.  Most of the damage is being done by the intensive use of pesticides on GMO crops, and the spread of genetically modified seeds.  It may not be anti-agrichemical-sponsored science.  But it is the science of life.

The loss of an iconic species is felt emotionally.  Some ordinary beauty leaves the world.  I remember a childhood in which butterflies of all kinds and colors were plentiful in my back yard, including Monarchs and Monarch look-alikes.  Now here on the North Coast we feel fortunate to see one large butterfly for a day or two each year.  That's not a scientific comparison, but it suggests the loss we feel.

But it's more than what we feel.  It's what we eat.  It's what we are, whether we choose to see it or not.  It's the world that sustains our species.  And we're destroying it, while obsessing on real but comparatively much less important news.