Attack of the Crows — Attack of the Humans

Ah, Japan…land of the samurai, the graceful movements of the tea ceremony, and really weird cartoons. Is it any wonder that a perfect parable of the ruined relationships caused by wasteful living would come from that fine land?

Crows are on the attack in Japan, and apparently, they’re quite the formidable opponent.

Blackouts are just one of the problems caused by an explosion in Japan’s population of crows, which have grown so numerous that they seem to compete with humans for space in this crowded nation. Communities are scrambling to find ways to relocate or reduce their crow populations, as ever larger flocks of loud, ominous birds have taken over parks and nature reserves, frightening away residents.

It is a scourge straight out of Hitchcock, and the crows here look and act the part. With wing spans up to a yard and intimidating black beaks and sharp claws, Japan’s crows are bigger, more aggressive and downright scarier than those usually seen in North America.

This was published in an article in the New York Times, and I have to say, I was fascinated by it.

It seems that the crows are building nests in power lines, damaging the electric infrastructure of the country. The problem has become especially prominent in recent years because of the expansion of the crow population — and guess what caused the population boom. Yup, humans.

How? Waste. Because crows are scavengers, they often feed off the trash left out by humans. And according the New York Times, Japan’s been generating more and more waste as it embraces a more Western approach to waste management. Thus, more waste, more crows, more problems.

But the fight of humans and crows is complicated; the crows are very foxy (no pun intended…okay, a little bit of a pun intended). They build fake nests in order to distract the workers ordered to remove the nests; they have found ways around nets that are meant to keep the crows from tearing into the garbage. Aside from hunting down the crows one by one and killing them, not many solutions seem to have worked. Probably one of the neatest, and most eerie, quotes I’ve ever come across in a news article was in the piece.

“Japanese react to crows because we fear them,” said Michio Matsuda, a board member of the Wild Bird Society of Japan and author of books on crows. “We are not sure sometimes who is smarter, us or the crows.”

Spooky.

But I think the question is interesting, because it sort of calls into question this whole idea of human domination. If anything, we’re constantly being bombarded with information about the way nature dominates humans, even if it seems to work the other way around (wishful thinking at its best). But for the most part, even if modern humans are somewhat enlightened enough to realize that they’re not in control of the wild, most people still believe that our cities are within our grasp.

After all, we build them the way we want them to be. The buildings are ours; the land is ours. We live there, our businesses are headquartered there, we drive our cars on the city streets. If threre’s something that we want in a city, the only things to stop us from getting it are money and time. Need a mall? Whoosh! There’s a mall. Need a skyscraper? Whoosh! There’s a skyscraper.

And through that whole process, because we build over forests and marshes and even the sea, we think that it somehow becomes ours. Hell, even I sort of believe hesitatingly in the polarity of society and wilderness.

But in Japan, we see that it is not so. In some ways, the city is the dwelling of the crows; it is their paradise, not ours. And when you start to look around your own city (if you have the misfortune to live in one), you might see that the place you think is yours might not be yours after all. Pigeons, crows, squirrels, rats…all of these creatures make their way in the city.

So. Who’s city is it? Good question. In the battle between crows and humans, it might turn out that we’ll just have to eventually give up, exasperated, and start to realize that even the cities aren’t ours.

Top Ten Reasons Not to Buy Bottled Water

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you may remember a previous post I made about a short little talk I gave at a forum on my campus. The forum was about trying to ban plastic one-use water bottles on campus, and you may be happy to know, the administration has agreed to get rid of plastic water bottles by phasing them out over the next three years! Pretty neat, huh?

In any case, my current professor also spoke at the forum, and now that I have him for a class, I was able to get an interesting list he created, entitled, “Top Ten Reasons Not to Buy Bottled Water.” There are some very interesting statistics in there, so I hope you’ll give it a shot! My professor’s name is Gary L. Chamberlain, Seattle University. Please do not use this list unless you have been given specific permission from the author. This is copyrighted material.

In any case, without further ado:

TEN REASONS NOT TO BUY BOTTLED WATER

Since 1976 there has been an increase of 1625% in the consumption of bottled water. In 2006 people in the US consumed 8.25 billion gallons of bottled water, or 30 billion actual bottles, a 9.5% increase from the year before.[i]

1. Research shows that bottled water is not purer than tap water. Recently, Pepsi was forced to admit that its bottled water, Aquafina, is actually certified tap water. 60-70% of bottled water is tap water with carbonation, seltzer, etc. In fact, an “estimated 25 to 40 percent of bottled water really is just tap water in a bottle—sometimes further treated, sometimes not.”[ii] According to the National Resources Defense Council, 25-40% of bottled water is tap water that has been treated, but sometimes not.
2. Tap water is regulated by the EPA, and is tested 3 to 4 times DAILY; bottled water is regulated by the FDA, and is tested once a week at the most. A recent Cast Western Reserve report found that 15 of 19 samples of bottled water had bacterial counts almost 2 times as high as Cleveland tap water.[iii]
3. If bottled water is derived in-state, then there may be no regulation. One in five states have no regulations for bottled water “made” in that state; there are no requirements that bottled water has to ban e-coli or fecal matter.
4. More water is used in making the plastic bottle that holds the bottled water than is in the bottle. At Coke’s India plants according to the company’s own report “3.9 liters of water are needed to produce each liter of beverage” because of the need to wash bottles, floors, and equipment in addition to the water used in the drink itself. Coke has 50 plants in India, using “hundreds of thousands of liters of water” per day.[iv]
5. The cost is much more: $1-$1.50 per bottle = $10/gallon for bottled water vs. $.04-$.05 per gallon for tap water. In Los Angeles you get 450 gallons of tap water for the price of one bottle of Evian![v]
6. The environmental impact is great. Bottled water impacts stream and river flows by drawing down water, reducing the water for vegetation, bird and animal needs. Bottled water is connected to global warming, using huge amounts of fossil fuels to manufacture and transport them bottles. The National Resources Defense Council estimates that 4000 tons of carbon dioxide is produced yearly—which is equivalent to the emissions of 700 cars yearly—by importing bottled water alone, not to mention the amount produced by transportation in the US.[vi]
7. It takes 1.5 million barrels of crude oil to create the plastic in one’s year’s supply. That would fuel 100,000 cars a year. Distribution requires the equivalent of 37,800 18 wheel trucks.[vii]
8. Plastic bottles create 2.7 billion pounds of plastic garbage in the US per year![viii]
9. There are cheaper alternatives: a carafe (e.g. Brita) = $.31/gallon; faucet filter = $.34/gallon; undersink filter = $.42/gallon
10. Coke and Pepsi bottled water factories in India (one of the largest sources) draw water from aquifers, depleting the water for farmers in the surrounding areas.

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[i] “The High Price of Bottled Water,” The Week, 7 Sept., 2007; Bryan Walsh, “Back to the Tap,” Time, 9 Aug., 2007.

[ii]. Quoted in Cameron Woodworth, “A Clean Drink of Water: Choices and

Responsibilities,” Sound Consumer (August 2006), 4.

[iii]“The High Price of Bottled Water,” The Week, 7 Sept., 2007.

[iv] “Around the Globe,” Seattle Times, 22 Sept. 2006.

[v] “The High Price of Bottled Water,” The Week, 7 Sept. 2007.

[vi]Brian Walsh, “Back to the Tap,” Time, 9 Aug., 2007.

[vii]“The High Price of Bottled Water,” The Week, 7 Sept. 2007; Editorial, “In Praise of Tap Water,” The New York Times, 1 Aug., 2007.

[viii] Bryan Walsh, “Back to the Tap,” Time, 9 Aug., 2007.

Information on Water Conservation:

www.h2ouse.org

www.wateraware.org

www.wateruseitwisely.com

www.weathertrak.com

www.friendsofwater.com

www.smarter.com

www.watersavingtips.com

WATER FACTS

–The minimum amount of water that the average person needs daily for drinking, cooking, bathing and sanitation is 13 gallons. The average person in the U.S. uses between 65 to 78 gallons of water daily.

–Gallons of water needed to produce:

One pound of potatoes – 100 gallons

One pound of rice – 340 gallons

One pound of chicken – 460 gallons

One pound of beef – 4200 gallons

One 6 inch silicon wafer (computer) – 1892 gallons

One gallon of gasoline – 9 gallons

One average US automobile – 39,000 gallons

Shallow or Deep Ecology?

Some of you may be familiar with the finer aspects of the philosophies of environmentalism; others, maybe not so much. If you find yourself in the latter category, this post may be helpful.

That might sound a bit arrogant, but I promise, it’s not, because I’m not going to write the main of this post. Instead, I’m going to copy and paste some posts that I’ve made recently on another cool blog, Media and the Environment.

Ultimately, I disagreed with my fellow blogger, Lauren Keith. I want to say, of course, that I respect her a great deal; it seems pretty evident to me from reading her posts that she’s a dedicated environmentalist. But it’s also evident that she and I disagree philosophically in our approaches to environmentalism. And that’s fine, and even useful, because I think our replies to each other are sort of indicative of the dialogue that’s happening between environmentalists right now.

So, without further ado, here’s the link to the blog post itself.

The debate essentially centers around a single question: how should environmentalism approach the general public? Lauren states that:

I don’t shop at The Merc to save the polar bears. I don’t make my roommates unplug the microwave (and soon the refrigerator, they joke) because the glaciers are melting. I do it so we can save ourselves.

This is the main point of hers with which I found I disagreed. To her credit, she states later:

It saddens me that a more expensive case of Bud Select has my friends more worried about the state of the environment than a carbon dioxide graph did, but I’m ready to meet them where they are: at the grocery store.

Essentially, she’s suggesting that environmentalism appeal to people’s sense of selfishness in order to get them to live a more sustainable lifestyle. For Lauren and many environmentalists in her camp, we need to bring the dialogue to the people, and not the other way around. Of course, this argument has many merits: such a strategy would be palatable to the population at large, and would be fairly effective fairly quickly. It makes the most sense in our unreflective society. Lauren wrote:

Because most of us don’t see polar bears, the ice caps, the Amazon and many other environmental jewels on this planet, they lose relevance to the average person when he goes to the grocery store and is trying to decide between buying traditional or buying organic.

That’s why I think we environmentalists need to rethink how we approach people and spread the message about saving the planet. Not everyone is going to care about polar bears or biodiversity loss, but they are going to care about themselves, their communities and future generations.

She’s right there; most people don’t really extend their ethic to include the planet. She’s also right that seducing people with economics would be an efficient way to change things for the better.\

But I vehemently disagree with this position because I think it does nothing to solve the deeper problems inherent in our social structure, the deeper problems that are truly causing environmental degradation. Generally, this sort of thinking is labeled “deep ecology,” a term coined by the philosopher Arne Naess. After she more fully explained herself in another comment, I wrote in my response:

Environmentalism is, at its core, a path that asks humans to extend their notions of being towards other organisms other than themselves. Polar bears and glaciers and mountains, valleys and streams and bald eagles, wheat and cows and fishes, all of these interact with us. All of them leave a distinct, important mark on our very being. We participate in the objects of our perception, as they say.

And once we begin to realize our individuality is not inherent, but rather, the result of relationships (thus, ultimately, something not our own), I think we’ll be much the better. Saying that we need to help the environment to help ourselves is not going to bring us farther down that path.

I think it’s pretty easy to see the polarity, now: some environmentalists focus on the “issues,” while others focus on the “problems.” That language is credited to Neil Evernden, a famous deep ecologist, who suggested that things such as pollution or climate change are the “issues” that result from deeper misconceptions of self and place, which are called “problems.” Evernden (I think I may have mentioned him in another blog, but I can’t remember) maintains that environmentalism is becoming weaker because it is starting to become mainstreamed. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not so idealistic that I can’t accept anything but a perfect victory. I understand compromises need be made. But I don’t think those compromises should come from the core of environmental philosophy; they should be political concessions, legal concessions, technological concessions. In other words, concede some of the “issues,” but never lose ground on the “problems.”

Lauren responded to my post by stating:

How long did it take you to make the connections between humans and their impact on the environment and the realization of the importance of nature? It’s taken me three years, and I don’t think I’m full-fledged yet.

So how can we expect people who don’t care about the environment to suddenly wake up and reduce their ecological footprints, stop reproducing (as much), stop consuming, etc.?

That’s where we need to rethink the connections that we are drawing and whether we’ve even done a good job drawing them. I can tell my friends all about Kansas bees dying or how much the aquifer has been drained, but until I make it relevant to them (explaining how there will be less food if there are no bees and no water), then they will finally be engaged in the conversation and start to relate to nature.

Environmentalists should stop driving on the greener-than-thou road. It’s no wonder people aren’t following us. We need to meet people where they are and take them on the same journey that we’ve already taken.

Again, we differ here. The paths we’ve gone down, to use Lauren’s language, are not just ones of lifestyle choice, of choosing to ride the bus instead of drive, of recycling and composting instead of simply throwing our stuff in the landfill. The paths environmentalists should be going down are paths that fundamentally restructure our notions of being, place, and ethics in order to conform them with a more sustainable way of being. In other words, environmentalists should not be preaching the gospel of commerce and economics as the solutions to our “problems,” but criticizing the attitudes that result from these forces, the attitudes that are directly responsible for the “issues” at hand.

Creating price incentives will help solve “issues,” but will not solve “problems;” demanding that people run around in a Prius instead of a Hummer will help solve “issues,” but will not solve “problems;” appealing to people’s sense of greed and ambition will help solve “issues,” but will not solve problems. Is it valuable that we do these things? Yes, insofar as we solve the issues, they are valuable.

But if they come at the cost of solving a “problem,” they simply are not. Encouraging greed, using greed, will ultimately do nothing for this planet, and that’s what it really comes down to.

Using the ESA to Protect Wolves

Another courtroom battle pitting environmentalists against some government entity is about to start.

This time, it’s our friends over at EarthJustice filing a suit on behalf of a couple of conservation organizations, including the Sierra Club and the Defenders of Wildlife (two organizations who themselves are filing suit against the Department of Homeland Security, as I mentioned in a different post), to challenge the removal of the northern Rockies gray wolf from the list of protected endangered species.

The species was removed from the list exactly a month ago today (March 28), and the impacts have been drastic. The population of wolves in the northern Rockies is estimated at about 1,500. That’s an awesome improvement over what it was previous to the wolves’ listing as an endangered species, but it’s still not quite enough. Different wolf populations must be able to interbreed with other populations, or the genetic pool of the wolves begins to get muddy because of inbreeding. But because of various modern, human impediments, the wolves are having a hard time interbreeding. For instance, the famous Yellowstone wolves have been isolated for over a decade, and scientists are troubled over the lack of genetic diversity.

If that’s not enough, in Idaho, it is now legal to kill a wolf without a permit!

(c) Control of Depredation of Wolves. Wolves may be disposed of by livestock or domestic animal owners, their employees, agents and animal damage control personnel when the same are molesting or attacking livestock or domestic animals and it shall not be necessary to obtain any permit from the department.

Pretty interesting. I think that this law is especially bad because it circumvents any need to go through an environmental impact statement process (which I’m pretty sure would be required under any normal circumstances). This means that there is literally no environmental regulation on wolf killing, other than the need to report a kill to the FWS.

Unfortunately, I can’t find the brief online (I’m emailing EJ after I post this), so I’m not exactly positive what the exact cause of action is. Anyway, I know I often promise an update after I post something then don’t actually have an update, but this time, I hopefully will. I mean it.

Any people out there who actually have experience with the law that would like to comment are more than welcome.

EDIT: The bill, if you were curious, is Idaho Senate Bill No. 1374.

Earth Day Trees!

As a fun Earth Day sort of thing, I thought I’d post up some photos of the trees on Seattle University’s campus. A few months ago, I toyed with the idea of writing an urban field guide to SU’s trees, and I took some photos to send to an artist friend of mine who had agreed to do the sketches. The plan has fallen through, to be honest, but it was fun to go out and take all these pictures.

Anyway, you may consider, as an Earth Day tradition, going around with a local field guide, spotting trees and plants and getting to know them. It’s fun! Really, I swear, it is.

Oh, please note: I’m not a photographer. At all. Again, these photos weren’t really taken with artistic intent, but as models for an artist. But they’re kind of fun to look at, I think.

Anyway, for being a very urban campus (literally right in the middle of downtown Seattle), SU does have some very beautiful and large trees.

Happy Earth Day, everyone!

Border Fence Harming Wildlife; Grants DHS Power to Waive Any Law

An excellent article in the Washington Post the other day about this border fence we’re building to keep out illegal immigrants.

The basic situation is this:  Congress passed a law that gave some guy (really specific, I know) the power to “waive” any law that would delay the construction of the border fence.  Those include worker safety laws and environmental laws.  If this seems pretty extreme, well, it is.  This isn’t just an issue of environmental law; this is an issue of Constitutionality.

…section 102 of the REAL ID Act amended section 102 of the IIRIRA [Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which was the first act by Congress that ordered the Executive branch to build the border fence] to provide the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary the authority to “waive all legal requirements” that he determines, in his “sole discretion,” are “necessary to ensure expeditious construction” of the barriers and roads authorized under the IIRIRA.

Here, page 6

That’s pretty amazing, to give that much power to just one individual.  But you know what makes it even worse?  The law passed 100-0 in the Senate, because of an Iraq war emergency funding rider.  There wasn’t even a debate in the Senate or the House about this bill.

Luckily, the Sierra Club and the Defenders of Wildlife are around to bring suit to stop this from happning.

I don’t want to go too much into this because the Washington Post article (and this New York Time article, as well) does a fairly good job of summing up the situation.  At least, I think so.  Probably the best part is when a scientist suggests that ecologists and biologists lay down in front of the bulldozers to prevent the construction from happening.  Wouldn’t that be cool?  Scientists turned activists…well, let’s hope that the Sierra Club and the DoW win their court case.

Probably the most ironic quote from the article:  “The legal and scientific battle over the fence — which will continue despite the administration’s waivers — highlights the reality that prized wildlife species are not respecters of international borders.”

Maybe it’s just me, but the fact that the animals don’t see borders…hmm…maybe there’s just a little bit of wisdom in that.

Vertical Thinking; The Kogi and Nature

Here’s a short reflection I wrote about the Kogi, an indigenous tribe that live in the mountains of Columbia. It was for my “Religion and Ecology” class, taught by Dr. Gary Chamberlain of Seattle University.  I’d love to hear from you!  I’d especially love to hear from people who may have met some of the Kogi personally; apparently, there are a few out there.  Anyway, without further ado:

******

There are few cultures that Western society has not shaped and altered.  From the lands in the Far East to the Inuit of Alaska, the cultural perspectives of modern Europe and the United States seem to be found no matter where one looks.  And yet, in the jungles of South America, there is a culture, the Kogi, who have preserved their culture’s ancient practices almost perfectly.  By studying the Kogi, we have a unique opportunity to examine a way of life and even a pattern of thinking that is radically different from our own.  One way of analyzing Kogi thought is through the paradigm of verticality developed by Yi-Fu Tuan in his book, Topophilia:  A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values.

In his paper, Tuan points out a strange development in Western history.  Before the scientific revolution, Western society, like many other non-Western societies, viewed the world as extending from the skies to the earth.  Their sense of horizontal distance paled in comparison to their sense of vertical distance.  This is attributed partially to the fact that most people before the scientific revolution did not travel more than twenty miles outside the place they were born.  However, with the birth of science and the realization that the heavens were not fixed spheres, the Western perspective began to turn, eventually flattening into the horizontal understanding of the world that we live with now.

The significance of this change may not be apparent at first.  However, Tuan’s description of the Western approaches to hydrology demonstrate his argument’s relevance, and also draws a stunning parallel to the Kogi understanding of hydrology.  Tuan writes that, “Earlier [before the seventeenth century], the hydrologic cycle was conceived as having essentially only one dimension, the vertical…The physical processes served as a popular image of the transcendental relations between the human soul and God” (131).  Thus, the people of the Middle Ages related the hydrologic cycle directly to their understanding of the soul.  Now, such notions seem ignorant at worst, poetic and antiquated at best.  Tuan writes, “When the hydrologic cycle acquired its horizontal dimension it lost its metaphoric power.  It became a purely physical process devoid of transcendental and symbolical overtones” (131).

This dichotomy is perfectly demonstrated by the Kogi tradition in juxtaposition to dominant Western perspectives.  The Kogi hydrologic system is sacred:  water which melts from snowpack in the high mountains (mountains that are considered sacred ground) flows down streams and rivers and as rain.  The water returns to the ocean, and the Kogi see this system as a visceral biological function of their goddess, whom they named Aluna.

In fact, this cycle is at the heart of their ritual life.  The Kogi males continually carry a small gourd, called a poporo, in which there are burnt seashells mixed with water.  This creates a mixture of lime in the bottom of the gourd.  The men then take long sticks and proceed to cover the outer rim of the gourd with the lime.  While doing this, the men are told by their priests, the mamas, to meditate on various aspects of Kogi life.  The gourd symbolizes the feminine, and it helps keep gender order among the Kogi people.

In a way, the poporo symbolizes the Kogi society itself:  a blending of the products of Aluna (seashells and water) that is used to teach lessons and bind the community together.  Absolutely everything in Kogi society metaphorically represents the connection of the society with their goddess:  from tent posts to weaving to their gourds, even the hats of the men.  All of these objects represent a vertical passage from the mundane to the spiritual, and yet, in a paradox not suited for our Cartesian worldview, the spiritual itself is the mundane.  The water rises into the sky, and yet, it falls back into the ocean.  The Kogi internalize this process in their gourds, and thus, the entire notion of selfhood is wrapped up in the powerful metaphor of Aluna:  everything comes from her, and even more, everything somehow points back to her, as well.

Such an intimate relationship with the land naturally results in an ecological ethics that has preserved the land.  Can our society learn from this?  Is it possible for the West to return to a more vertical interpretation of place?  Or have we progressed so far down the horizontal path that there is no possible way to redemption?  These questions, I think, probe at a deeper question:  how do we define ourselves?  And does this definition incorporate the land into itself?

The effects of mining and greenhouse gas emissions have hurt the Kogi physically.  But these actions strike not just at the ability of the Kogi to sustain their bodies; pollution also strikes at their very identity as a culture.  Why do these destructive practices not affect Western society in a similar matter?  Climate change negatively affects Americans and Europeans daily, yet the concern is not for the land, but rather, for commercial interests or self-preservation.  This is horizontal thinking:  nothing has significance except that which is beneficial to us.

Thus, perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from the Kogi is that of ecological selflessness.  The most difficult piece of reuniting Western society with the land will be to rip ourselves from the anthropocentrism to which we desperately cling.  Like the Kogi, we must understand that we are players in the grand scheme, important actors, but certainly not the masters we think we are.  Seeing the metaphorical in nature, reclaiming the mystery and wonder from a world obsessed with atomistic empiricism, and ultimately, beholding ourselves in the clouds and in the waters are the lessons we must learn from the Kogi if we are to live in harmony with reality.

A Speech About Nature

Here’s a transcript of a speech I gave tonight; my girlfriend made fun of me because I wrote in the jokes.  Anyway, the speech is in its rawest form, so pardon any weird punctuation, etc.  Video was taken, so I might try and get my hands on that and put it up, as well.  Let me know what you think!

********

First off, I’d like to thank you all for everything you do.  It’s an honor to speak with all of you this evening, and I’d especially like to thank Clarke for giving me the opportunity to come here and give my two cents.  We’ll see how this goes…most people try to get me to shut up, so being asked to talk for fifteen minutes is sort of new to me.  She was actually going to get the Dalai Llama to speak, but I guess that didn’t work out, so sorry.

But in any case, I’d like to speak about Nature tonight.  My name is Bryson Nitta, I’m a sophomore environmental studies major here at SU.  I’m here on behalf of my organization, the Environmental Students of Seattle University, and I think I’ll sort of begin with a brief story.  It’s the story of our species.

Modern homo sapiens evolved about 200,000 years ago on the continent of Africa.  Their population, after a brief period of near extinction, has grown to nearly 6.7 billion.  The species inhabits nearly every biome on the planet, from the deserts of Earth’s equatorial regions, to the frozen glaciers of the north, to the diverse forests of the tropics.  All this happened in the blink of an eye.  Their enlarged cerebral cortexes developed language, tools, and even self-awareness.

Nearly 11,500 years ago, homo sapiens began to develop civilization.  Since then, human migration tends to lead out from sparsely populated areas into densely populated areas, called cities.  Cities grew to nations, nations, to empire, until the entire the planet was under the dominion of a human civilization.  That period of time, 11,500 years, accounts for not quite six percent of the time that homo sapiens have been on this planet.  Recorded history, which originated about six thousand years ago, accounts for three percent of homo sapiens existence.

And yet, in that brief amount of time, Earth has been changing rapidly.  Species have disappeared from this planet.  As things stand now, the number of threatened animal and plant species worldwide: 11,046.  The number of known species humans have forced to extinction in the past 500 years: 816.  Some scientists call this period of time we live in, “The Sixth Extinction.”  Of course, the last great extinction was 65 million years ago, when a meteor stuck the earth and the dinosaurs died off.

Even worse, things aren’t getting better.  Percentage of known mammal species listed as threatened: 24  A quarter of known reptile species are listed as threatened.

Nearly a third, thirty percent, of known fish species are listed as threatened.

So what happened?  How did it come to this?  In such a short amount of time, it seems evident that something caused our species to grow distant, to grow apart from the rest of the planet.  Was it technology?  Was it time?  Or are we just exploiters, pirates, thieves at heart?

I don’t think it was any of those things.  Neil Evernden, a famous environmental philosopher and prominent deep ecologist says that environmentalism shouldn’t just be about cleaning up pollution, or capping CO2 emissions, or saving the rainforest.  He says that those things are simply the tip of the iceberg, and that underneath waters, the true problem that we’re facing, the problem that manifests itself in climate change and acid rain and oil spills, the problem that we’re facing is a question of philosophy, outlook, and relationship.

William J Hill, a professor at Oxford University, wrote a paper in which he suggested that the main problem can be viewed in light of the metaphorical vision of nature that our society for the most part embraces.  For Hill, a metaphor isn’t just a poetic or symbolic statement or concept…no.  He views metaphor as an important interaction between reality, and the human mind.  He writes that “one particular metaphor is chosen and becomes the vehicle around which a systematic vision of the world is then organized.”  .  The metaphorical vision of nature sums up the attitude of a particular society towards the earth.

So, what’s our metaphor?  Hill says it’s that of a machine.  With the emergence of atomistic science a few hundred years ago, our attitude towards nature has turned from a positive one to an exploitative one.  He writes, “No longer is our environment resonant with meaning as it was in the Middle Ages, and no longer can we feel at one with it in the manner of Renaissance.  The world of our choice is different.”

And I think Hill is right.  We do view nature as a machine.  How many times have we heard a cell described as a factory?  In my geology class I’m taking this quarter, my professor has described plate tectonics as a conveyer belt.  We here about DNA as the “building blocks” of life.  This sort of language has never been used before in history to the extent that it is now.  And just to sort of cement my point, here’re some commercials that I’d like to show you…

So, you can see this mechanistic metaphor everywhere you look.  And it affects us.  But how?  Say we agree that the mechanistic metaphor is present in our society?  What does it matter?

Well, I think it leads us to view nature as a thing we can take apart.  It’s not an entity, it’s not an organism.  It’s a tool…it’s something we can control.  It’s sad to me, to think that this is how we treat the planet, the thing which has given us literally everything we have.  We lose sight of the wonder and the awe in nature.  Max Oelschalger describes the loss of wonder to science and mechanism in his description of Galileo.  “Through the telescope Galileo confirmed the Copernican hypothesis.  What he lost was the sweeping field of view of naked eye astronomy, the relation of the Milky Way to the starry sky, and the movement of the wandering stars across the ecliptic plane.  And perhaps, in his intense concentration, he lost also the sounds and smells of the night and the awareness of himself as a conscious man beholding a grand and mysterious stellar spectacle.  Galileo was no longer within nature, but outside it.”

I’ve been attending Catholic schools my whole life, especially Jesuit schools.  When I was in high school in Spokane at Gonzaga Prep, I was taught this meditation by a Jesuit priest.  And he sat me down, and he had me take out some paper.  We sat down, we said a prayer, and then the meditation began.
The meditation went like this:  the priest asked me to list the name or a brief description of every single person I could remember ever having met in my entire.  Everyone.  My family, friends, friends of friends, family of friends, strangers…it took me a while, but at the end, written on a physical sheets of paper, there was a portrait of my interactions in this world with my fellow humans.  Every single one.  And the priest then told me to look at the names, and ask myself, “When I met this person, in my contact with this person, did I act with love?  Did I act with compassion?  Or did I act out of fear?  Or hate?  Or ignorance?”

And as I looked at that list, I realized I wasn’t as loving a person as I wanted to be.  And it changed me a little bit.

Now, a few years later, I imagine what would happen if humanity sat down with some paper.  And instead of writing the names of all the people that we’ve interacted with, instead, humanity wrote down the names of every species it has interacted with.  Frogs, kangaroos, trees, fish, birds, whales, worms, everyone.  And then, after we’d finished our list, what if someone asked us, “When you met this species, in your contact with that organism, did you act with love?  Did you act with compassion?  Or did you act out of fear?  Or hate?  Or ignorance?”

I think that we would recognize then, how terribly we’ve treated the planet.  It wouldn’t be hard to see.  But that’s not the part that concerns me.  What concerns me most of all, is that I’m not sure that humanity is willing to try to change its ways, to try and love this place we live in, and the creatures that we live with.

We’ve been given so much.  The rain doesn’t fall because we tell it to, and the sun doesn’t shine because control it.  The earth spins, the seasons change and flowers bloom all on their own.  The food we eat grows because it grows, not because we tell it to.  And yet, despite these blessings, we still have the audacity to think that we are the only ones that matter.

Preserving this planet is about respecting our place.  Nothing more.  It doesn’t take that much for an individual to be in awe and to see the worth in nature herself; but what will it take for an entire society to see that worth?  We cannot commodify beauty.  We certainly can’t put a price tag on the things that we’re given from nature.  So what do we do?

I don’t have the answers.  Not yet.  Probably not ever.  But I think it starts with a reversal of this metaphor of a machine, and I think that this can carry us to a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood with other species, and with nature.  As Philip Wheelwright wrote, “If reality is intrinsically latent and unwilling to give up its innermost secrets…then the best we can hope to do is catch partisan glimpses, reasonably diversified, all of them imperfect, but some more suited to one occasion and need, others to another.  If we cannot ever hope to be perfectly right, we can perhaps find both enlightenment and refreshment from changing from time to time, our ways of being wrong.”

Thank you.

Our New Metaphor

Such an ambitious title.

If you read the post below, “Metaphorical Vision,” you’ll know that William J. Mills, the article’s author, believes that a large part of our ecological crisis is derived from a metaphor that takes the holism of nature and turns it into a machine. Because of this “desacralization,” –probably going to be one of my new favorite words– our society is able to separate itself from and justify its domination of the natural world.

So that begs the question: can we construct a new, better, more loving metaphor for our society? One that will bring humanity back into the fold, that will unite us psychologically and (should I say) spiritually with every other organism and non-organism on this planet?

It’s all tall order. And I don’t think, I don’t even dare to dream, that such a metaphor could be constructed in blog post. But it’s an interesting thought experiment, and I think it’s one that everyone should undertake, both for the sake of Nature, but also for the sake of their own peace of mind.

Where to start? I think that maybe we can go back a little bit, back to the civilizations that had a much more harmonious relationship out of nature (if not out of necessity instead of enlightened understanding). Most evident to me, living in the Northwest, are the Indians (Native Americans, for you PC people out there). What exactly is the Native metaphor for nature, and how did it result in their ability to not only live off the land, but to incorporate themselves within it?

Sadly, I don’t know enough of actual Indian mythology to be able to accurately derive any sort of qualities that could explain the Indian way of life and its apparent harmony with Nature. Perhaps we could say that their dependence and subsistence on the natural world resulted in their mythology being extremely ecocentric; but without being an Indian myself or an anthropologist, I can’t say anything with certainty.

Plus, I feel as if there needs to be some sort of adaptation of a Western metaphor or understanding that we can relate to without too much reorganization.  In order to convince society that it ought to reconstruct the way it views nature, the best strategy might be to guide it gently towards a vision of nature that society can grasp quickly and easily.  So…any ideas?

I’m honestly at a loss…restructure the Western metaphor for the world?  How?  It’s an almost hopelessly immense task…

Anyone…?  I feel pretty alone with this one.

America’s Power?

Oh, my. Where to start?

I think this ad speaks for itself. I found it while I was looking for examples of exploitation of the natural world for a talk I’m giving Saturday on my campus (I’ll post a transcript of the speech as well as an upload of my PowerPoint within the week). Anyway, thought I’d share. Here’s another gem:

Thank you, General Electric, for making the rape of our planet look sexy. Way to go!