Six Years Ago Today

Nature creates art, reflects Nature
(at the Honolulu Zoo, July 2010)

Culture comes of nature

By Moristotle

[Originally published on June 28, 2011, not one word different.]

This morning I finished reading the concluding chapter of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s 2010 book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. The chapter, titled “Living with Consciousness,” sketches consciousness’s contributions to the success of living organisms; that is, places it in evolutionary context.

Motomynd: Global warming: How concerned are you...really?

[In the article that follows, Motomynd puts the heat on Moristotle as well as on Moristotle's readers. But to show he's a good sport, Moristotle confessed yesterday that he turf turds his lawn.

Recently your blog was abuzz about global warming. From the responses [see comments on the post "In awe of Nature's four billion years on Earth"], the consensus seemed to be that not only was the earth warming, but people were causing it. So here is a quiz designed to find out if your readers are concerned enough about global warming to actually be doing their part to combat it—or if all is just rhetoric. Answer the following questions to establish your GWAR—Global Warming Action Rating:

1. The stereotypical great American lawn is a green desert that, from an environmental perspective, ranks only a couple of notches above a parking lot. In our quest for tidy expanses of green grass we kill the earth beneath it with chemicals, spew pollutants while mowing and trimming, and waste water and energy. What does your lawn say about your GWAR?
    A) I have a yard that requires no mowing, watering or fertilizing. It takes care of itself and I pay the necessary attorney fees to keep my neighbors and the zoning commission at bay. Perfect score! 10 points! You don't just talk the talk, you walk the walk!
    B) Most of my yard is natural. I never seed, feed, or water. I do essential trimming with hand tools, or with a battery powered trimmer—and I recharge the batteries with solar panels or a windmill. Great score! 7 points! You talk, you walk, and you compromise on your terms.
    C) Part of my yard is natural. The rest I feed, seed, and water and I take care of, or hire someone to take care of, with a traditional gas-powered mower. 4 points, at least you are making an effort.
    D) To keep peace with the neighbors I have a yard that requires mowing, watering, and seeding. And aerating and plugging, whatever that is. No score! Zero points! You talk, but you don't walk—you barely crawl.

2. American business commuters create an immense carbon footprint. When traveling back and forth to work, what do you do to help with the problem?
    A) I walk or pedal a bicycle. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I travel exclusively by mass transit. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I carpool, commute alone in an electric vehicle, or use a gas-powered vehicle that gets at least 60 miles per gallon. 4 points, at least you are making an effort.
    D) I drive alone, get way less than 50 mpg, and can’t be bothered thinking about it.  Zero points! But you knew that already, right?

3. American casual travelers also create an immense carbon footprint. How do you travel for fun?
    A) I walk or pedal a bicycle. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I travel exclusively by mass transit. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I carpool, commute alone in an electric vehicle, or use a gas-powered vehicle that gets at least 60 miles per gallon. 4 points, at least you are making an effort.
    D) I drive alone, get way less than 50 mpg, and can’t be bothered thinking about it.  Zero points! But you already knew that again, right?

4. Since this is America and we can’t get away from travel, let’s talk about how we go on vacation. Yes, there is a recurring theme here.
    A) I walk or pedal a bicycle. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I travel exclusively by mass transit. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I fly, or travel with three others in a vehicle that gets at least 30 miles per gallon, or drive with at least one other person in an electric vehicle. 4 points. At least you are making an effort.
    D) I drive alone, get way less than 50 mpg, and still don’t want to be bothered thinking about it. Zero points! But you already knew that again, right?

5. The typical American meat-based diet is another huge waste of resources that creates an oversize carbon footprint. So how do you rate?
    A) I’m a vegan. I use no animal products at all. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I’m an ova-lacto vegetarian. I eat a grain and vegetable-based diet supplemented only with eggs and milk. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I am working on becoming a vegetarian. Eating mostly fish and chicken, and just the occasional burger, counts for something doesn’t it? 4 points. Again, at least you are trying.
    D) This is America, of course I eat a lot of meat. Zero points! Yes, I already knew that.

6. How and where we eat can impact global warming almost as much as what we eat.
    A) I never cook. Really. I eat everything raw. Perfect score! 10 points! (But how on earth do you do it? We really want to know!)
    B) I cook once or twice a week. The rest of the time I warm leftovers in a solar oven or microwave. Great score! 7 points!
    C) I cook when I want and eat out when I wish. But at least I favor dimly lit restaurants that serve mostly vegetarian fare. 4 points, keep trying.
    D) I drive a gas guzzler, sit 10 minutes in a drive-thru with the motor running, and cook outside on a grill that uses more fuel per meal than a hybrid car does in a week. Yeah, I know, zero points.

7. Enough about food—how about shelter?
    A) I live in a tent (or tepee or yurt) and I travel as the season changes like Native Americans and Mongols, so I never use heat or air. And by Mongols I mean descendants of Genghis Khan, not the motorcycle gang. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) I live in an environmentally friendly multi-family housing complex, or a single-family home completely powered by solar or wind. Great score! 7 points!
    C) My single-family home is powered by the grid, but at least I updated the windows and insulation and use insulated blinds, drapes, and curtains. 4 points. Keep it up.
    D) I’m pretty sure we added storm windows on the north side of the house, but gas, oil, and electricity aren’t really all the expensive, so I use what I need. Yep, zero points.

8. And how about minimizing the environmental impact of that shelter?
    A) I carry my tent on my back and walk from winter home to summer hangout. What more can I do? Hard to argue with that. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) We use a state-of-the art thermostat to maximize the benefit of our environmentally friendly heating system, water the garden with rain water, and compost all we can. Great score! 7 points!
    C) We use one of those fancy computer-controlled thermostats, wear more clothes indoors in winter so we can set the heat lower, and we threw out a bunch of stuff and downsized to a smaller home. 4 points. You are getting there!
    D) If it is cold we turn up the thermostat and if it is hot we turn it down. So what? Zero points, at least you are consistent.

9. How does your recycling affect your GWAR?
    A) We buy items only in environmentally friendly packaging and recycle and compost everything. We never have trash. Perfect score! 10 points!
    B) We recycle all our cardboard and paper products, and all the plastic bottles and jugs, but keeping track of all those different numbers on plastic is just a little too much. Great score! 7 points! That is a lot more than most people do.
    C) Cereal should be in a box, not a bag, so that’s the way we buy it. But we do recycle the boxes and a few other things. Four points, about average.
    D) We have four trash cans. Do you really expect us to find room for a recycling bin? Need we even say zero points?

10. Here is a chance to earn some bonus points.
    A) I never buy water in plastic bottles. Great! Add 10 points to your score!
    B) I maintain recommended tire pressure and check it weekly. Good! Add 7 points!
    C) I turn the thermostat down to 60 in winter and wear a sweater made from recycled plastic bottles. Nice touch, add 5 points.
    D) I always recycle all batteries and old electronics. That counts. Add 3 points.

So what does your GWAR say about you?
    100 or more points: You are a global warming action hero! They may make a movie and market a line of toys based on your exploits.
    80-100 points: You not only talk the talk, you walk the walk.
    60-80 points: Not awful, but you need more walk and less talk.
    40-60 points: Probably about average, sadly.
    20-40 points: Barely below average, even more sadly.
    0-20 points: Do you just not care? Or are you among those people who believe the world is going to end in a few months, so why bother?

In the sticks

Jonathan Franzen

Walter Berglund and his assistant Lalitha (introduced last Friday in the "Think globally, act locally" excerpt from Jonathan Franzen's 2010 novel, Freedom) are in West Virginia, where they have just presented documents needed to commence demolition to open up fourteen thousand acres of future warbler preserve. They've celebrated at a steakhouse down the road from the Day's Inn by Walter's having the very first drink of his life (he claims), a beer, and Lalitha's getting drunk on three gin martinis. They've talked perhaps a bit too loudly for rural West Virginia, and Walter has been verbally accosted in the men's room by a guy "an exact match of Walter's profile of the kind of driver who didn't believe in turn signals."
    "Like the dark meat, do you?" the guy says.
    "She's Asian," Walter protests.
    "Candy's dandy but liquor's quicker, ain't that right, pal?"
    Made better aware of where they've been conversing, Walter thinks they should leave and take their food back to their rooms.
    Lalitha topples over as soon as she is deposited on her bed and Walter tells her he's going to his room to eat.
    "No, don't," she says. "Stay and watch TV. I'll sober up and we can eat together."

In this, too, he indulged her, locating PBS on cable and watching the tail end of the NewsHour—some discussion of John Kerry's war record [it's 2004]....
    He himself had been under tremendous pressure....Walter now needed to...start work in earnest on his anti-population crusade—needed to get the intern program up and running before the nation's most liberal college kids all finalized their summer plans and went to work for the Kerry campaign instead.
    In the two and a half weeks since his meeting in Manhattan with Richard, the world population had increased by 7,500,000. A net gain of seven million human beings—the equivalent of New York City's population—to clear-cut forests and befoul streams and pave over grasslands and throw plastic garbage into the Pacific Ocean and burn gasoline and coal and exterminate other species and obey the fucking pope and pop out families of twelve. In Walter's view, there was no greater force for evil in the world, no more compelling cause for despair about humanity and the amazing planet it had been given, than the Catholic Church, although, admittedly, the Siamese-twin fundamentalisms of Bush and bin Laden were running a close second these days. He couldn't see a church or a real men love jesus sign or a fish symbol on a car without his chest tightening with anger. In a place like West Virginia, this meant that he got angry pretty much every time he ventured into daylight, which no doubt contributed to his road rage. And it wasn't just religion, and it wasn't just the jumbo everything to which his fellow Americans seemed to feel uniquely entitled, it wasn't just the Walmarts and the buckets of corn syrup and the high-clearance monster trucks; it was the feeling that nobody else in the country was giving even five seconds' thought to what it meant to be packing another 13,000,000 large primates onto the world's limited surface every month. The unclouded serenity of his countrymen's indifference made him wild with anger.
    Patty [his wife] had recently suggested, as an antidote to road rage, that he distract himself with radio whenever he was driving a car, but to Walter the message of every single radio station was that nobody else in America was thinking about the planet's ruination. The God stations and the country stations and the Limbaugh stations were all, of course, actively cheering the ruination; the classic-rock and news-network stations continually made much ado about absolutely nothing; and National Public Radio was, for Walter, even worse. Mountain Stage and A Prairie Home Companion: literally fiddling while the planet burned! And worst of all were Morning Edition and All Things Considered. The NPR news unit, once upon a time fairly liberal, had become just another voice of center-right free-market ideology, describing even the slightest slowing of the nation's economic growth rate as "bad news" and deliberately wasting precious minutes of airtime every morning and evening—minutes that could have been devoted to raising the alarm about overpopulation and mass extinctions—on fatuously earnest reviews of literary novels and quirky musical acts....
    And TV: TV was like radio, only ten times worse. The country that minutely followed every phony turn of American Idol while the world went up in flames seemed to Walter deserving of whatever nightmare future awaited it.
    He was aware, of course, that it was wrong to feel this way—if only because, for almost twenty years, in St. Paul, he hadn't. He was aware of the intimate connection between anger and depression, aware that it was mentally unhealthy to be so exclusively obsessed with apocalyptic scenarios.... [beginning at 12 hours, 14 minutes, 37 seconds in the digital recording, pp. 313-315]

I hadn't thought until the present chapter how much like Walter I might be, if not myself so comprehensively angry and sometimes depressed as this fictional character seems to be (and as his creator, perhaps, might be)....

Further discussion

Think globally, act locally

Jonathan Franzen
(born 1959)

It's 2004 in Jonathan Franzen 2010 novel, Freedom, and Walter Berglund and his assistant, Lalitha, are meeting with Walter's old college roommate Richard Katz about enlisting the latter's rock musical stardom to help a conservation cause.

"Listen, Richard," Walter said. "The conservatives won. They turned the Democrats into a center-right party. They got the entire country singing 'God Bless America,' stress on God, at every single major-league baseball game. They won on every fucking front, but they especially won culturally, and especially regarding babies. In 1970 it was cool to care about the planet's future and not have kids. Now the one thing everyone agrees on, right and left, is that it's beautiful to have a lot of babies. The more the better. Kate Winslett is pregnant, hooray hooray....
    "Kids are beautiful," Walter said. "Kids have always been the meaning of life. You fall in love, you reproduce, and then your kids grow up and fall in love and reproduce. That's what life was always for. For pregnancy. For more life. But the problem now is that more life is still beautiful and meaningful on the individual level, but for the world as a whole it only means more death. And not nice death, either. We're looking at losing half the world's species in the next hundred years. We're facing the biggest mass extinction since at least the Cretaceous-Tertiary. First we'll get the utter wipeout of the world's ecosystems, then mass starvation and/or disease and/or killings. What's still 'normal' at the individual level is heinous and unprecedented at the global level."
    "It's like the problem with Katz," it sounded like Lalitha said.
    "Moi?"
    "Kitty cats," she said. "C-A-T-S. Everybody loves their kitty cat and lets it run around outside. It's just one cat—how many birds can it kill? Well, every year in the U.S. one billion songbirds are murdered by domestic and feral cats. It's one of the leading causes of songbird decline in North America. But no one gives a shit because they love their own individual kitty cat."
    "Nobody wants to think about it," Walter said. "Everybody just wants their normal life." [beginning at 8 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds in the digital recording, pp. 221-222]

    Thus the novel I'd been finding hugely entertaining and rewarding for its sharply etched characters, its sardonic social commentary, the adult twists and turns of its plot, its masterful writing has turned profound as well. What a read!

July 12. Some critical comments on this article have convinced me that I needed to have said more about what I thought was "profound" about the passage from Freedom. The critic latched onto Lalitha's contention that "one billion songbirds are murdered by domestic and feral cats every year in the U.S." I told him that I wasn't concerned with the precise number (or with whether Franzen might or might not agree with what Lalitha was saying).
    I told him that, for me, the passage made the point that in going about our "normal lives," there can be significant unintended consequences. I wasn't concerned with the distinction between songbirds and other birds, which the critic also latched onto. The songbird issue is a single issue in the larger context of human over-population and species extinction.
    I take unintended consequences seriously as a matter of conscience. I worry about things like driving my car a mile when I could have walked with no ill effects (and possibly some healthful ones) and thereby contributing to the amount of greenhouse gases going into planet Earth's atmosphere, about eating animal flesh and thereby subsidizing factory farming of animals, about not being more watchful for the subsidized predator of a house cat who roams our neighborhood and stalks the birds for whom I put out various seeds and thistles in our feeders every morning of my life. I may have wished that my two children would have more than a total of one offspring, but I am abstractly glad that at least my line hasn't contributed to human population growth.
    Maybe the book had turned profound only to me. Maybe I worry too much. In however many years before Earth is barely habitable, it'll hardly matter what this lone individual here did or didn't do.
    It would matter enough to make a difference only if many more had worried.

The critic reported the shooting of a stray cat by someone his wife knows, which prompted my wife to send me a link to a December 2, 2007 article in The New York Times ("Kill the Cat That Kills the Bird?," by Bruce Barcott). The article tells a cat-shooting story that

went something like this: On the evening of Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2006, Jim Stevenson [a bearish, ruddy-faced 54-year-old former science teacher who is known as the ornithological guru of Galveston, Texas] took a break from watching the election returns to look at some birds at San Luis Pass, a ripply channel connecting Galveston Bay to the gulf. Stevenson parked his white Dodge van with “Galveston Ornithological Society” bannered on its side, near the end of the San Luis Pass bridge, a tollway that connects Galveston Island to Follets Island. He found a spot in the low grass-speckled dunes and waited. Soon enough, he saw a handful of piping plovers, a federally listed endangered species. Then he saw something else: a scraggly cat stalking the plovers. A colony of about a dozen feral cats had been sleeping under the bridge. The cats liked to wander into the dunes for the same reason Stevenson did: the birds....

    Stevenson was the cat killer. His trial lasted a week, but the jury was deadlocked, so the case was dismissed. The article concludes: "The war between cats and birds—and among their protectors—continues."
    Many of the protectors of birds (perhaps most) seem to be attempting to think globally, while protectors of cats (whose populations are not endangered) seem primarily to be "wanting their normal life," as Walter says.
    The larger continuing war, generally, is between people wanting to think globally and people wanting their normal life not to be indisposed. We all want our normal life, but are we willing to make some sacrifices for the larger, longer common good?

July 15: More thoughts of Walter.
_______________
Wikipedia:

"Think Globally, Act Locally" urges people to consider the health of the entire planet and to take action in their own communities and cities. Long before governments began enforcing environmental laws, individuals were coming together to protect habitats and the organisms that live within them. These efforts are referred to as grassroots efforts. They occur on a local level and are primarily run by volunteers and helpers.

Culture comes of nature

Nature creates art, reflects Nature
(at the Honolulu Zoo, July 2010)

This morning I finished reading the concluding chapter of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's 2010 book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. The chapter, titled "Living with Consciousness," sketches consciousness's contributions to the success of living organisms; that is, places it in evolutionary context.
    In earlier chapters, in which he lays out his theory of how the brain orchestrates consciousness and our sense of self—of being the felt protagonists of our lives—he frequently invoked evolutionary development, as, for example, in comparing the brains of mammals to identify the order in which the regions of the human brain developed and the order's implications for the role of the various regions in regulating homeostasis and conferring adaptive, or competititve advantage.
    The following passage jumped out at me as capturing my own developing sense of nature's creating not only biological organisms but in the course of time creating culture by virtue of having created organisms with brains capable of manifesting mind and eventually capable of devising repositories of collective learning. My personal sense is reflected, for example, in my caption for the July 2010 photograph from the Honolulu zoo.
    Damasio writes:

Nervous systems developed as managers of life and curators of biological value, assisted at first by unbrained dispositions but eventually by images, that is, minds. The emergence of mind produced spectacular improvements in life regulation for numerous species, even when images lacked fine detail and lasted only during the perceptual moment, entirely vanishing thereafter....
    Once self comes to mind, the game of life changes, albeit timidly at first. Images of the internal and external worlds can be organized in a cohesive way around the protoself [a theoretical entity in Damasio's theory of the sequence of brain/mind development] and become oriented by the homeostatic requirements of the organism....[pp. 286-287]

If nature can be regarded as indifferent, careless, and unconscionable, then human consciousness creates the possibility of questioning nature's ways. The emergence of human consciousness is associated with evolutionary developments in brain, behavior, and mind that ultimately lead to the creation of culture, a radical novelty in the sweep of natural history. The appearance of neurons, with its attending diversification of behavior and paving of the way into minds, constitutes a momentous event in the grand trajectory. But the appearance of conscious brains eventually capable of flexible self-reflection is the next momentous event. It is the opening of the way into a rebellious, albeit imperfect response to the dictates of a careless nature.
    ...The self that I envision as capable of rebelliousness is a recent development, on the order of thousands of years, a mere instant in evolutionary time. That self draws on features of the human brain acquired, in all likelihood, during the long period of the Pleistocene. It depends on the brain's capacity to hold expansive memory records not only of motor skills but also of facts and events—in particular, personal facts and events, those that make up the scaffolding of biography and personhood and individual identity...Last, it depends on the invention of external memory systems parallel to those held by each brain, by which I mean the pictorial representations offered by early painting, carvings, and sculpture, tools, jewelry, funerary architecture, and, long after the emergence of language, written records....[pp. 289-290]

Damasio's "Rebelliousness" (as in culture's rebelling against and trying to improve nature) I can't but read in the context of this blog's recent theme of a few individuals rebelling against certain aspects of popular (or majority) culture: religious beliefs and practices that rational people would think we could have outgrown, burdensome traditions that tether us to unprofitable pasts, adolescent politics that degrade our national business into playground bullying....
    It would seem that culture has a way yet to mature before the benefits of self's having come to mind can be realized by a collective majority of the organisms who possess a human brain.

Who does care what it's called?

On Sunday, Frank Rich wrote about whether the conflicts in Iraq should be called "civil war" ("Has He Started Talking to the Walls?" The New York Times). His concluding statement was:

Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in Iraq don't give a damn what we call it.

On the way to that conclusion, Rich had remarked:

Whatever you want to label what's happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the Olsen twins.

I don't know who "the Olsen twins" are, but I understand Rich to be referring to Americans' absorption in their popular culture and their own lives, despite what might be going on in Iraq. I don't think that they give a damn what the conflicts are called either.