Joy

Posted on June 4, 2019 by rpetermogielnicki under Uncategorized

For those fortunate enough to experience love’s first physical touch, the accompanying rush of joy is unforgettable. Whether it comes as the the warmth of a newborn child held against a parents chest or the first time hands are held between partners who will spend a lifetime together, the accompanying shiver of ecstasy etches an indelible memory.

I put up a wren house behind our place last fall, hoping to reproduce a childhood experience of being awakened by the energetic song of a pair nesting in the woodpile outside my bedroom. This spring a cascade of lusty trills broadcast success. https://www.almanac.com/content/bird-sounds-house-wren A pair of house wrens were romping about like a pair of smitten lovers. Hopping from branch to branch, their trembling bodies radiated ecstatic energy. Every few seconds one of them would pop into the box entrance, stay inside for a bit, then pop back out. Then they both would do a whole body shiver. It was a scene of pure joy.

Some would dismiss that description as baloney. Alexandra Coughlan in her review of Richard Smyth’s book A Sweet Wild Note reflects common wisdom: “Birds sing not for joy or exultation, as the poets would have us believe, but for immensely practical reasons. They need to advertise for a mate, mark their territory or warn other birds of danger.” She may be right, though I believe something more was going on with those two wrens. First, they’d already found each other. Second, there wasn’t any other bird around against which they needed to protect their discovery of a perfect nest site. And third, there was no danger in the vicinity. Those birds certainly looked as though they were celebrating their discovery of one another and of finding the perfect place to raise a family.

Quintessentially joyous events – falling in love, experiencing the birth of a child, hearing one’s true love say “I do”, learning of a loved one’s recovery from a serious illness – are mostly even more about the future than the present. Pleasure is feeling good now. Joy is certainly pleasurable now but it is multiplied by the anticipation of intense pleasure in the future. Happiness is a toned down version of joy. Ecstasy is joy spiritualized.

One isn’t smitten by pleasure or even happiness but one can be smitten by joy. It often comes unexpectedly and typically evokes a physical response at the smiting moment: hopping, dancing, clapping, shouting – for joy. The word apparently has its roots in the Latin – gaudere – to rejoice – and the Oxford English Dictionary says of rejoice “To feel or show great happiness.” (italics mine). Assuming those wrens were experiencing great happiness, they were clearly showing it.

Some scientists – Richard Dawkins prominent among them – theorize that all of existence consists only of matter and energy as we know them. He and his fellow evangelical ontological materialists urge us to believe that ideas and feelings are exclusively explained by electrical discharges careening along a network of biological wires. Joy, for them, is fully explained by a physical brain some of whose hypercomplex connections have been made super-efficient by a sudden dopamine bath. Watching those wrens, and reflecting on my own firsthand experiences with the undeniable substantiveness of a flush of joy, I find that explanation hard to swallow.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel comes at the issue from a different direction, arguing that the most undeniable element of reality is the primacy of our own perceptions, thoughts and feelings. The physical stuff follows. That goes down better for me.

Stephen Hawking says that a theory is basically a model for making predictions. He’s given some thought to how to tell a good theory from a not so good one and offers up four criteria which the ideal theory should fulfill. “1. It is elegant. 2. It contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements. 3. It agrees with and explains all existing observations and 4. It can make detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out.”

Ptolemy’s geocentric cosmology, he says, was a fairly satisfactory model of reality given the mathematics and instruments of his time, though it required some arbitrary tweaking to create an accurate calendar. Then Copernicus, using more sophisticated math and more careful geometric measurements, demonstrated the superiority of a heliocentric view of the solar system in predicting the movement of the planets and producing a calendar with fewer illogical fudge factors. Copernicus’s view, Hawking says, better fulfilled the four elements of a good scientific theory.

Nagel’s view fulfills the Hawking criteria a lot better than Dawkins’. Elegance? For something to be perceived as elegant, it must create a feeling of rightness in the observer. Adjustable elements? The face reality of a perceived intense feeling requires no arbitrary or adjustable elements. Explaining all existing observations(aka perceptions)? Well yeah! But when it comes to making detailed predictions about the future, our ideas and feelings do fall short, as efforts to time the stock market prove time and again! The evangelical materialists miss all of Hawkings’ criteria. At least Nagel gets three out of four.

I got used to the happy avian couple singing and dancing around their little house for a couple of days, but then they vanished. A cat on the loose had been prowling the neighborhood and I suspected that one of the wrens had fallen prey to that critter’s feline instincts. I was sad that the pair didn’t complete their nest but I imagine the remaining mate felt much worse. Grief comes to mind.

The high altitude thrill of a joyous event undoubtedly risks grief should tragedy befall the object of one’s delight. Viewed from 100,000 feet, the trajectory of my own mortal span (for which I don’t recall signing a contract) ends in some pretty significant losses and goodbyes, at least as we currently understand things. In the meantime, though, knowing how fragile and ephemeral joyous things are makes them all the more precious.

Perfect Oysters; Imperfect Produce

Posted on March 3, 2019 by rpetermogielnicki under Uncategorized

I rarely open the NYTimes Style Magazine but last year one of its headlines caught my eye, asking, in 23 point New Times Roman, “With Cultivation Have Oysters Become Too Perfect?”

The essay summarizes oyster farming’s history (which apparently dates from ancient Rome) and oyster popularity (which has waxed and waned for generations). The article ends with a description of the way modern aquaculture methods produce a handsome standardized product year-round with fewer of the risks and less of the romance of the wildlings of the past.

Come to think of it, that’s something which can said about much of modern life. Crossing the country in a covered wagon in 1840 must have been a lot more romantic than a commute to work but the per mile risk of dying on the Oregon trail was 0.167% compared to the .000001% risk of driving a mile in 2008.

Of course eating a wild oyster isn’t as risky as trekking the Oregon trail but you can still die of cholera or cut yourself on the razor sharp shell. Meanwhile the farmed ones are checked regularly for pathogens and often tumbled by their growers to knock off those nasty sharp edges and , as one grower brags, tumbling makes their shells “prettier”.

The Merriam, Webster Dictionary defines “pretty” as “pleasing in a delicate way”. That may be stretching it a bit as a descriptor of tumbled oysters but it does seem to properly describe a quality present in abundance in the produce section of grocery stores. Its pursuit has surely boosted the bottom line of pesticide manufacturers – thereby threatening butterflies, honey bees and who knows how many other arthropods – and that standardized perfection is a major hardship for organic farmers since their crops often rank low on the prettiness spectrum.

Recognizing that produce falling below the aesthetic standard of grocery chains often was destined to rot in the field or in a farm’s compost pile proved inspirational to the entrepreneurial founders of “Imperfect Produce” whose mission is “to eliminate food waste and build a better food system for everyone.”

By strengthening the market for fruits and vegetables that don’t look exactly like the archetypal apples and beets on the pages of children’s books the company claims to help farmers, make food more affordable and help the environment by reducing pesticide, fertilizer and water used to grow food that would eventually go to waste. We signed up a while back and have been entirely happy with the way the food tastes, sometimes even entertained by the way it looks, and consistently feeling self righteous in that we were doing right by the planet……. until we came across an article in the New /Republic.

Not so fast, the author said: sounds like greenwashing. Aren’t these folks just competing for produce that would otherwise be sold to outfits that don’t care about looks like catsup producers and cider makers? Or, worse, wouldn’t much of that produce otherwise be donated to food banks or scavenged by gleaners? And, since they won’t reveal their sources, aren’t they just another customer for corporate agriculture. Meanwhile those oyster farmers trumpet how their hundreds of thousands of caged and tumbled shellfish prevent coastal “dead zones:” by purging our estuaries and coastal lagoons of excessive algae from our overzealous use of fertilizer. Side effects, however, are that their mechanized power equipment contributes to our atmospheric CO2 load while the areas they’ve leased from the state are off-limits for recreational use by fishermen, clammers, skin divers, and kayakers.

It’s hard to disagree that both perfect produce and pretty oysters accomplish little more than catering to our whims, but some say the benefits are simply not worth the costs. Both sides have their points but something gets lost in the argument. I don’t think many people find grocery shopping exciting. All that familiar packaging. All those time-worn logos lining the shelves. The soulless pyramids of carefully stacked identical apples – all precisely the same size, shape and shade of Granny Smith green. In contrast, there’s actually a bit of adventure when it comes to opening the week’s Imperfect Produce delivery and discovering a corkscrew carrot or, as one happy customer exclaimed, “a sweet potato as big as my head !”. It’s a feeling not entirely unrelated to slurping a misshapen wild oyster and then marveling at its uniquely ugly shell. As our corporate culture gets better at discerning every detail of what maximizes sales, and as economies of scale wipe out the variety afforded by competition, our lives themselves bit by bit become standardized. And as each of our whims and caprices are met at lower and lower personal costs our individual skills at doing things for ourselves atrophy. Personal creativity – a quality often stimulated by a surprising turn of events or an unexpected variation – ceases to be necessary or inspired. And the deep sense of fulfillment, and personal accomplishment achieved by making one’s own life better in a uniquely idiosyncratic way is diminished.

A while back, on a road trip out West, my son and I stopped for lunch in a small Montana town. On one side of the street was a modest mom and pop luncheonette; on the other, a familiar pair of golden arches with its predictably satisfying hamburgers. We talked over the choice and although we both liked Big Macs well enough we took a chance on the luncheonette. The owner turned out to be a talkative woman and rather than repeating a well-rehearsed corporate script she chatted with us about the area as we watched her carefully assemble our sandwiches on the other side of the bar. Among the things she told us was that off on a side road on the way out of town there was a bunch of folks from The Smithsonian digging for dinosaurs. That unexpected tip led to an unforgettable adventure exploring a bonafide paleologic dig site. Sometimes taking a chance really pays off. Modern grocery chains, oyster farmers and fast food franchises give us predictability. In exchange, we lose something which is easy to overlook but hard to articulate. An economist might call it an opportunity cost.

Chemistry has given us those bins of archetypic apples, but in the process we’ve quietly lost some beautiful butterflies while Harvard labs work on miniature drones to pollinate crops in case bees disappear. We have food science to thank for those perfectly predictable burgers which have so successfully outcompeted the quirky mom and pop operations. The electrifying frisson one experiences on hearing a sound outside one’s tent while camping in Yellowstone Park disappears if apex predators are exterminated because they may reduce the incomes of ranchers’ by taking an occasional calf, born, incidentally, on public national forest land leased by the rancher for grazing.

H.G. Wells, in The Time Machine, creates a distant dystopian future occupied in part by the Eloi, one future branch of the human race shaped by progress: “For countless years I judged there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger from wild beasts,…… no need of toil…….They were…. delicate ones” …of …“childish simplicity, decayed to mere beautiful futility, physical and intellectual inadequacy…..And the little people displayed no vestige of a creative tendency. …….. They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping …..A flow of disappointment rushed across my mind. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure—had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another.” A bit of an overstatement of the point I am trying to make, but beautifully articulated.

In his contemporary best seller, Enlightenment Now, Stephen Pinker takes the opposite tack. Extolling the Enlightenment’s methods of thought and the value of quantification, he exhaustively catalogues (556 pages, 120 graphs, 1297 footnotes) the undeniable and well-known benefits of the modern age. But since technology and the scientific method rely heavily on measurement, Pinker necessarily gives short shrift to the non-quantifiable. Ignored in his cost-benefit analysis of the Enlightenment’s methods of thought are the thrill of exploring the unknown, the deep pleasure of creating or experiencing beauty, the joy of a happy surprise, the zen of immersion in the natural world, the pride in triumph over adversity, the wonder of viewing the stars in total darkness. Yes, many of us are warm, comfortable, healthy and well fed, but like the individual whose only tool is a hammer, we keep looking for nails to pound even if, in the process of pounding, less visible things of great value are destroyed.

The crucial challenge of our age is how to deploy our intellectual gifts to escape the addictive power of satisfying our every material whim and caprice at the expense of slowly cooking our planet, driving out of existence a majority of it’s non-human life forms and extinguishing a great many of the profound ineffabilities which are so easily overlooked but much more deeply satisfying. I do not claim to know the answers to these questions, but in the meantime while I’m working on them I think I’ll go to the grocery, pick up a dozen beautiful farmed oysters and enjoy myself.

Skunks, Sea Lions, Moose, Mice and Us

Posted on February 6, 2019 by rpetermogielnicki under Uncategorized

I paid a fair amount of attention to skunks during childhood vacations on the Rhode Island shore where my folks built a small cottage just before I was born. The area had been mostly pasture until the 1920’s and by the ‘40s it was reverting to early scrub crisscrossed with stone walls. Most of the cottages were built on piers and the combination of stone walls, scrub habitat and cottage crawl spaces was perfect skunk habitat. The small lawn around each one often showed evidence of nocturnal skunk work as the animals dug for grubs, earthworms and other mustelid fare.

Skunks lent an air of high adventure to any nighttime foray. A flashlight was a must – its beam sweeping side to side in search of black and white stripes. Once, when an exceptionally long afternoon Monopoly game at a friend’s house was followed by a flashlightless walk home after dark, a too-close-for-comfort encounter remains burned in my memory. But years later when my then-widowed mother spent summers in the cottage alone, skunks provided considerable peace of mind. “Need to keep my guard dogs happy.” she’d explain as she tossed out food scraps in the evenings when I was visiting.

Over the past several decades things have changed. Located, as it is, halfway between New York and Boston the place has attracted urban big money and nearly all the cellarless small cottages built up on piers so plumbing could be drained from beneath each fall have been replaced by substantial “summer homes”. And to be honest, we’ve contributed to the trend – disassembling the original cottage and reusing as much of it as we could while building a year round house large enough to accommodate our children and grandchildren for lovely family vacations together. But the skunks are gone.

It wasn’t intended. We didn’t mean to make my mother’s guard dogs homeless. But now they exist only in the realm of family lore. Meanwhile our neighborhood lawns are awash in chemical grubicides.

Nowadays we spend part of each year on the west coast where sea lions have been in the news. They’re members of a select group of non-human species with a high brain to body size ratio – joining elephants and dolphins and bypassing our primate relatives – chimpanzees, monkeys and gorillas. They’ve been shown to solve IQ tests that many humans have trouble passing. A captive California sea lion studied by the Long Marine Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz could use basic logic (If A=B and B=C then A=C). In rankings of zoo animals’ popularity sea lions rank just behind llamas and ahead of rhinoceroses . One poll respondent said “Sea lions are cute, friendly, playful, happy and loving sea creatures.”

But their populations are fragile. As numbers approached endangered species levels in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, the US congress passed the Marine Mammal Population Protection Act in 1972. That law according to the US Fish and Wildlife service, prohibits, with certain exceptions, the “take“ of marine mammals in U.S. waters and by U.S. citizens on the high seas…” Why, then, is the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife now killing them? It’s a long story.

In the 1920’s the US Congress appropriated funds for the Army Corps of Engineers to examine ways the Columbia River might be developed to benefit flood control, navigation, irrigation and electricity – an action which had been advocated over a decade earlier by President Theodore Roosevelt’s Inland Waterways Commission. In 1932 the Corps submitted their “308 report” whose recommendations found their way into then candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign promises and reached their denouement with FDR’s speech dedicating the completed Bonneville Dam on September 28, 1937. Consideration of ways to mitigate the dam’s impact on salmon migration was begun only after construction was well underway. Fish ladders and bypasses were thus retrofitted and subsequent improvements in the fish bypass system have resulted in gradual recovery of salmon runs after the dramatic decline of stocks caused by interrupting the river’s free flow. But here’s the thing: before keying in on these bypass routes many endangered salmon now congregate in the area just below the dam.

Like humans, sea lions have the capacity for culture – defined by some as the accumulation of knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends on the ability to learn and then transmit knowledge to others and then to succeeding generations. They share another human trait as well which makes the Oregon Fish and Wildlife service’s step towards specicide more understandable. Like Homo sapiens, Zalophus californianus relishes salmon. Eventually, a few sea lions venturing upstream in the Columbia discovered the salmon smorgasbord below the dam and, intelligent and generous creatures which they seem to be, spread the word among other members of their tribe: “There’s an easy feast to be had just a short swim up the Columbia.”

It is no small irony that the president who started the ball rolling towards this dilemma was the same one who established the US Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, The National Wildlife Refuge System, doubled the number of sites within the National Park system and is considered by many to be the “conservation president”. And it is even a less small irony, it seems to me, that the same creature which built the dam to improve its quality of life is now planning to kill off another creature (whose existence it had also once threatened) because it is taking advantage of a situation the first creature has created!

In spite of our good intentions we certainly have a way of muddling things up. In the 1950’s scientists discovered that the blood of horseshoe crabs contained properties that can very efficiently detect bacterial contamination of biological preparations like vaccines. Horseshoe crab populations, already under pressure as a source of bait in crab and lobster pots, fell dramatically as their blood was harvested for this purpose. Then birders noticed that the red knot – a shorebird famous for performing one of the longest migrations known – was in serious decline. Why? It turns out that a series of critical refueling stations along the route make it possible for these five ounce feathered fluffballs to fly from the arctic to the antarctic and back every year.

One of the critical refueling stops? – the Chesapeake Bay horseshoe breeding grounds. For millennia the ancient crustaceans have been depositing billions of high energy eggs on the bay’s mudflats and red knot migration has evolved to correspond exactly with the blessed events. Better detection of human infection, fewer horseshoe crab eggs, more malnourished red knots arriving on arctic breeding grounds, fewer knot eggs, fewer knots.

Of course, sometimes our species’ behavior unwittingly has actually boosted wildlife populations. Our eating habits have been very beneficial for Mus musculus, North America’s native house mouse. The mice have returned the favor and enhanced our population a bit by becoming a critical part of many successful medical research projects. We’ve also given quite a boost to Periplaneta americana, AKA the American cockroach !

Sometimes our relationship with other species gets really complicated. Since the 1940’s Lake Superior’s Isle Royale National Park has been home to a population of moose and some wolves. Over the years, the moose population has oscillated between 2300 and 700 and the wolf population between 50 animals and 12 – the balance between predator and prey keeping the herbivores from destroying their finite food supply and providing a living laboratory for a variety of ecological studies reported in hundreds of papers in scientific journals. This was how “nature” was supposed to work. Recently, however, at the nadir of one of the wolf population oscillations, a confluence of events – accidents, illnesses, inbreeding – has brought the wolf population down to two – a nine year old male and his seven year old daughter/half-sister – both now geriatric animals. What’s to be done? The response on the part of biologists, National Park Officials, and The Ecological Research Institute – after considerable thought – has been to capture wolves from elsewhere and replenish the Isle Royale population. So much for keeping National Parks “natural”.

There is a longstanding conversation about whether or not we humans are a part of or separate from “nature ”. Most modern religions and many political conservatives hold the view that man and nature are separate. The idea spans millennia from the Old Testament’s charge that man “subdue” the earth “and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” to an article in Forbes magazine entitled, “In the Battle of Man vs. Nature, Give Me Man”, which urges that we “…… give a clear mandate to leaders who celebrate man’s exceptionalism, understanding that the incidental problems created as we harness technology to bend nature to our will can be solved using more technology.” In contrast, many of today’s environmentalists hold to the view, summarized by one-time White House Press Secretary and journalist Bill Moyers that “We need a powerful new story that we are a part of nature and not separate from it.”

Whether you consider man a part of nature or separate from it, whether we’re inadvertently making skunks homeless or advertently rebalancing a wilderness predator/prey ratio; it’s pretty clear that we are an integral part of earth’s ecosystem. It is also clear that as our numbers increase geometrically, our impact on that ecosystem becomes disproportionately large. Is this dominion, or, like a wolfless population on Isle Royale are we now in danger of despoiling our habitat, threatening our quality of life and even risking our own demise?

Fortunately, like sea lions and elephants, we are relatively intelligent. And, like those crows and parrots Jennifer Ackerman writes about in The Genius of Birds, , we are problem solvers. So what’s to be done? Perhaps a place to start is revisiting the National Environmental Protection Act of 1970. That Federal Statute requires that certain federal and non-federal projects require an analysis of their environmental impact. That may be a start, but the act has no approval or disapproval capacity nor does it establish a body to make such determinations. It merely says the information needs to be collected and considered. And there seems to be a great deal of controversy about where the line is drawn defining which actions require an EIS and which do not. While it would be quite a radical departure from the status quo and something not at all likely to happen in our current political climate, perhaps it is worth considering an agency more like the Food and Drug Administration which would either approve or disapprove projects of large enough scope based on the project’s environmental pros and cons.

There would be lots of details to work out. How would projects requiring approval be defined? How would enforcement occur? Would there be an iterative process to identify the types of projects which should have fallen under the jurisdiction of the agency but did not, but turned out later to have important unexpected environmental impacts (like horseshoe crab phlebotomies). Imperfect lines would surely have to be drawn., No matter what, I’m afraid, such an agency could never go fishing with a project net fine enough to prevent a project that would result in a homeless skunk .

Going….going……… gone?

Posted on December 15, 2018 by rpetermogielnicki under Uncategorized

You’d think an apocalypse would rate more than a single appearance in the news cycle but the subject briefly came and went in the magazine section of the New York Times: “The Insect Apocalypse is Here”. In it staff writer Brooke Jarvis reports on a growing number of recent studies documenting a dramatic decline in insects. And then it struck me. Once upon a time a drive in the country would leave our car windshield with a bad case of bug juice acne. In fact it wasn’t unusual to hear an occasional “splat” when a particularly juicy airborne arthropod crossed the road at the wrong time. When was the last time that happened?

Apparently it was this kind of casual observation that piqued the curiosity of some members of a club of bug watchers* in Krefeld, Germany whose unique techniques and compulsive archiving had them systematically measuring the mass of insects in German nature preserves since 1989. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809 Using standardized collection methods they were able to document an 80 percent decline in insect mass over 29 years. This quantitative analysis was entirely consistent with their casual observation that in 1989 a liter bottle was needed to hold the insects they collected at the site, while the most recent samplings required only a half liter bottle. It also rang true for other observers who realized that now they ingested fewer bugs than they did several decades ago during bike rides through the Danish countryside.

The recognition of a tremendous decline in insect biomass puts into important context scores of previous carefully documented observations of the decline and extinction of individual species and amplifies the significance of each. Instead of a large and growing number of soloists each singing their own woeful ballad we now have a huge orchestra and chorus singing and playing a single massive tragic symphony in a minor key.

The NYTimes magazine article strikes me as even more consequential than Rachel Carlson’s conservation milestone, Silent Spring. Carlson called attention to the disappearance of iconic species at the top of the food chain – peregrine falcons, eagles, ospreys – while the findings of the Krefeld group relate to species close to the bottom. The disappearance of birds of prey is an aesthetic tragedy. Destruction of the opportunity of ever observing a falcon’s stoop or a fish hawk’s plunge is surely as great a loss for nature-lovers as destruction of Van Gogh’s Starry Night would be for aesthetes. And the cultural damage from the loss of iconic species goes further – eroding the evocative choices of names for athletic teams (think Philadelphia Eagles), automobile brands (think Ford Falcon) and even military weapons (think the Marine helicopter V-22 Osprey).

But insects? Hardly iconic, though they do grace the names of a few athletic teams (think Charlotte’s Hornets). Unlike raptors, however, insects are a critical element in the earth’s entire ecosystem – pollinators of a great many of the plants that feed the herbivores (as well as us humans) and a major direct food source for legions of reptiles, amphibians, birds and freshwater fish.

If the Krefeld study turns out to be the tip of an arthropodal iceberg – if insect biomass worldwide is dramatically dwindling – three questions loom. What is causing it? Does it matter? And, if it matters, what should we do about it?

Possible answers are already being tossed about to the first question: loss of habitat to agricultural monocultures, widespread pesticide use, changing climate, a toxic mix of a variety of pollutants, some combination of all of the above. Answers to the second question are no doubt divided for a variety of reasons. Among the “noes”: “Bugs are a nuisance – the fewer the better.” “I couldn’t care less – there are more important things, like my 401K, to worry about.” “I’m sure human ingenuity will find a way to replace any important function they are performing, if there are any.”

Among the “yesses”: “I’m an alfalfa farmer and my income depends on pollinating insects.” “No birds, no bats, no frogs or toads – life is going to be all plastic toys and video games.” “OMG, of course it matters!! If crop and forage pollination depends on insects, what is going to happen to us??”

Once conventional wisdom finally reaches the conclusion that it matters, what next? By then, there may well be more clarity about causation. But my money is on multiple whammies.

If I’m right and the decline is the result of climate change, widespread insecticide use, a multi-pollutant stew and habitat destruction from monocultural agriculture we are certainly between rocks and hard places or, if one prefers a more literary metaphor, we are faced with the choice of boiling, baking or ficasseeing our children before consuming them. In fact, it is almost as hard to imagine sustaining our present life in a world with less land devoted to agriculture, free of pesticides and without massive fossil fuel consumption as it is to think of the absence of insects and all of the subsequent downstream effects.

One response to this Swiftian dilemma is acceptance of our fate. This problem, like our individual mortality is unsolvable. Therefore make the best of the present moment.

Another is acceptance’s close cousin, denial. Perhaps even more tranquilizing than acceptance, with an identical outcome. But if neither of those choices is appealing, where to start?

First don’t hunt for a silver bullet. We got where we are as a result of uncountable small steps by many many people over many decades. Backtracking is going to be the same. And there is no shortage of where to start. Decline bags when purchasing small items, reduce or end your use of garden pesticides, walk or bike on short trips instead of driving, work to elect enlightened representatives, join another environmental organization, set an example, talk it up etc. etc. and so forth. Meanwhile realize that it is impossible to live one’s life in modern day America without contributing to the headlong rush to destruction in many ways, but by keeping the problem foremost in our minds and taking every opportunity to make one more tolerable favorable action after another we will end up taking two steps backwards – unwinding the problems we’ve caused – for every one we take on our present path towards an apocalypse which may well include a lot more than insects.

Given the importance of the Krefeld study, other confirmatory reports are certain to appear soon and capture a spot in the news cycle. When that happens – and perhaps even before – we can expect professional pushback and disinformation from some predictable corporate players., Pesticide manufacturers, crop dusters, agribusiness, fossil fuel extractors, shippers and refiners and other deep pocketed likely suspects are no doubt already hard at work plotting their response. And there surely will be a segment of the population ready to amplify it.

Recently at a neighborhood association discussion about doing away with two cycle gasoline powered leaf-blowers one community member asked. “What on earth…… What on earth are we going to use to get rid of all those leaves? ” Hmmmm. Somehow only a generation or two ago we got along with a much more modest arsenal of ways to destabilize the entire earth’s balance. Maybe we need to get out of the box we’ve been drawn into and reinvent things like a tool with multiple bamboo tines on the end of a long wooden handle that runs on muscle power.

*If bird watchers now prefer to be called “birders” should we consider people interested in watching insects “buggers”?

Animal Minds

Posted on January 21, 2018 by rpetermogielnicki under Uncategorized

Image by Elana Larena in Discover Magazine

After quite a bit of trial and error, I think I’ve outsmarted the squirrels in my front yard – at least for a while. Now that the bears have holed up for the winter, I’ve put out the bird feeders and what with sunflower seeds and peanut-embedded suet cakes within eyeshot they’ve risen to the challenge. It’s been something to watch, but a forty dollar Lexan umbrella over the sunflower seed feeder and a slathering of canola oil on the metal post that holds up the suet seems to have foiled them, at least for now.

The suet pole is located near the tip of a slender, flexible apple tree branch. A squirrel tightropes out much of the way and studies the suet but then retreats despite the fact that she is within 3 feet of her goal – a distance that I’ve seen her easily cover from other more solid launch sites. What’s holding her back, I think, is the branch’s flexibility which would absorb much of the energy of her leap. Is she really just pre-programmed to take the distance, her leapability and the stability of her launching platform into account or is there something more complex going on? If so, that seems like a pretty sophisticated conscious calculation.

There has been much written lately about animal minds, and I am not speaking here about Harvey Weinstein and his ilk. In Beyond Words, ecologist Carl Safina, writing with his usual grace, assembles a mountain of careful observations to build a convincing case for complex feelings and thoughts among elephants, wolves, orcas and other species. http://carlsafina.org/book/beyond-words-what-animals-think-and-feel/ Jennifer Ackerman – an equally gifted writer – takes a similar tack in The Genius of Birds, focusing especially on corvids and parrots. In addition to observations about avian thoughts, feelings and problem-solving, Ackerman makes a powerful case for a true aesthetic sense among the bowerbirds of New Guinea and Australia. http://www.jenniferackermanauthor.com/genius-ofbirds/ On more personal notes, Lynda Lynn Haupt’s up very close and personal observations of a pet starling inspires her to research the relationship between Mozart and his own bird pet bird in Mozart’s Starling https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/event/lyanda-lynn-haupt-mozarts-starling, while Helen MacDonald in H is for Hawk details the complex relationship between the goshawk she is training and her own grieving spirit, noting along the way how the bird’s eyes laugh while playing with a toy she’s made for it. In a Zen-like drift she gradually comes to actually think like the bird when the two hunt together. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/books/review/helen-macdonalds-h-is-for-hawk.html And recently the New York Times science section ran a video showing dolphins goofing around in front of a one-way mirror and reported that these animals developed self-awareness well before humans https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/science/dolphins-self-recognition.html

It is difficult to come away from reading these four books and watching that video anything less than convinced that elephants grieve, wolves cooperate, orcas have sophisticated communication methods, dolphins have fun, crows and jays have advanced puzzle-solving capabilities and bowerbirds appreciate certain kinds of art when they see it. With this explosion of similar information it is hard not to believe that we humans have been selectively blind to animal emotions and thoughts for a long time, though that should come as no surprise, really, given our stubborn insistence on our incredible superiority – from the days of believing the universe rotated around us onward. Humility has never been what the “H” in H.sapiens has stood for.

There is quite a list of candidates which have been held up historically as the quality which makes us superior. Opposable thumbs, tool making, language, altruism, etc have all had a run until some naturalist finds another species that has the same quality. Granted, we are better at some of those than any other species, but what is it that makes those particular qualities the special ones. There are plenty of other things we aren’t very good at like finding our way to a small atoll in the southern hemisphere after spending a couple of years soaring over the Pacific Ocean or recalling the exact spots where we’ve buried a winter’s supply of hazelnuts in the forest floor the previous summer.

What it may come down to, perhaps, is a super-tautology: we are unique because we possess a unique set of abilities ( just as every other species has its own unique set.)

Another way of thinking about what makes us special is the way we exploit. Of course every creature has to sustain itself. Herbivores eat plants. Carnivores eat meat. Omnivores eat everything. And some species of ants keep slaves and keep herds of aphids. But we humans have taken exploitation of our environment to a new level. We have our prey, of course, but what about our clothes, our shoes, the horsepower and oxpower that led us to the industrial revolution, those ships of the desert and water buffalo that are still in use today, the bomb sniffing dogs, the homing pigeons carrying coded messages over enemy lines, the generations of great whales that lit our lamps and oiled our machinery? And that’s just a list of the exploited animals. Consider all those plant fibers that make up most of our textiles, the palm leaves fanning pharaohs, the chocolate bean husks mulching our gardens. And we’re still talking just about biota. Now think of the water we consume manufacturing, the mountaintops we remove mining. Compared to all those other life forms which get by pretty much entirely on their own except for the nutrients necessary to sustain their metabolism, we are exploiters without equal. Though it may not be something to boast about, it is beginning to look as though that massive exploitation is the quality which separates us from the rest of life on earth! – the elephant in the room until now because it is such an ignoble quality.

Of course exploitation need not be all that bad if you can sanctify it in some way. Conceptualize a truly supreme being to which all else is by definition vastly inferior. Imagine yourself made in his or her image – though with a few imperfections. Then be given authority by that power to have “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” Pretty heady stuff. Makes a virtue of exploitation. And once you have that supreme being in whose image you’ve been created, it’s easy to set up a hierarchy that values other bodies and minds better or worse in proportion to how they resemble your own.

Clinging to that belief of a hierarchy is pretty convenient. Without it a great many of our ethical foundations are candidates for rearrangement. If animals, or at least many animals , are more than unfeeling unselfconscious automatons; if they do indeed, experience grief, terror, security, love, beauty or even feel intimations of immortality it’s kind of disquieting to continue with business as usual. Just look at all the trouble caused by the realization that human bondage was really, really wrong.

I’m not at all sure where this is all going to lead. I like my steak just as much as anyone and I don’t think Zinke is going to become a tree hugger any time soon. But I do sense some movement. It may take a while to sort all this out but I think a couple of generations from now we are going to be leading very different lives.

* * *

Post Script: As I’ve been mulling over these conundrums, that squirrel has figured out that if he tries to climb up that slippery pole enough times he’ll eventually rub off enough grease to be able to shinny all the way to the top and gorge on that suet – successfully exploiting the exploiter of Bos taurus who hung it there.

A Wild September Ramble

Posted on October 16, 2017 by rpetermogielnicki under Uncategorized

Today is the kind of early September day that makes me want to swallow the earth, imbibe all of its fragile enormity, fall down on my knees before its dazzling beauty and worship it with all the passionate zeal my amygdala can muster – accepting with humility the eucharist of this glorious blue globe. Today is the kind of day when my heart sparkles with the crystal clarity of the sky and ocean. Today I want to join those murmurations of tree swallows flowing in liquid synchrony, their morphing river an unvirtual kaleidoscopic screensaver against a cerulean sky as they scour the feastladen air for tiny fellow fliers whose bits of energy will fuel the trip to the swallows’ winter home.This morning is the kind of morning whose light makes the air itself a visible, tangible thing and reveals the fact that all that holds this essential life-sustaining aura against the earth and keeps it from flying off into the darkness of space is gravity!

Today is the kind of day that makes me look at the migrating monarchs with respectful awe, imagining the miracle of their silent flight, fueled by sips of flower juice and taking them, pollutionless, from here to the mountains of Mexico – all in vivid contrast to the growling steel fabrications that carry us to Walmart while spewing streams of stuff to soil our personal space. Today is the kind of day where thousands of sunshards ricochet off perfectly angled wavelets and put to shame the bejeweled artifices of all history’s emperors combined. Today is the kind of day that makes me think, as the sea levitates in response to the pull of the rising moon, that you and the moon and the sea and I are all made of the same stuff and that the same force deforming our globe and lifting entire oceans of seawater moonward pulls on us. The force and the idea both stretch my mind, lift my spirits.

For anyone who cares to listen, the whole of it plays like a great symphony – individual beauties blending in magnificent harmonies The music swells, expands, explodes like a grand fireworks show, then ebbs to a fragile poignant thread. Aldo Leopold heard it. So did Rachel Carlson.

Paradoxically though, just as my spirit swells, I grow brutally aware of my personal insignificance – spatially, temporally and intellectually. Somewhere between the inner workings of subatomic particles and the edges of the outer ripples of the big bang – somewhere between that first unimaginable flash of the beginning of what we know and the end of everything – my MEness comes and goes as a far-thinner-than-a razor’s edge scintilla. Stephen Crane expressed a similar feeling:

” A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

Are the two viewpoints reconcilable? I think so. The crucial word in Crane’s poem is the “I”. By getting the distinction between “me” and “it” into better perspective the distortions created by our sense of personal self-importance can be at least partially corrected and the tragedy of our inconsequential evanescence softened.

Martin Buber explores the issue with his reflections on the I-Thou and I-it relationships. Zen “enlightenment” may be getting at the same thing by jettisoning the distractions of our personal cravings to achieve peace and understanding. So may the Old Testament’s description of man created in God’s image if thought of in its broadest sense with God being more the whole of Creation rather than some creator. And so is the modern conservation movement’s theme of recognizing that Homo sapiens is an inseparable part of nature – a reality which may explain why wilderness, given the opportunity, can be so spiritually uplifting.

To begin to get things right, to correct the distortions, to reconcile our sense of self-importance with the vastness of time and the cosmos – requires merging the “me” with the “it” by giving ourselves to creation rather than having dominion over it, by giving the earth and things on the outside of our thin skins the same sacred value as the “us” and the “ours”. This needn’t involve asceticism or self sacrifice. Deep appreciation of the miracle of creation and the value and interconnectedness of all things is a place to start. Replacing self-satisfied certainty with curiosity about how a butterfly thinks is progress.

And there is other brainwork that can help. The ideas of Copernicus and Galileo exposed the hubris of a geocentric universe. Jane Goodall showed us that tool-making didn’t make Homo sapiens so very special. Myriad researchers have proven that those bird brains do many things well beyond the capacities of ours. Carl Safina lays out plenty of evidence that other species have very complex systems of communications. And even within our own skin, we now know that, thanks to work of microbiologists at the Weizmann Institute, there are just about as many bacterial cells cohabiting the very space I call “me” as there are cells that bear my DNA!

But even though we are not the center of the universe, not the only tool making species or the only one with a language, not even the only occupant of our own skin, we are singular in some ways: our species is growing in number faster than any other, we are rapidly depleting global diversity, we are steadily devoting the surface of our planet to the few types of organisms we can eat or wear and we seem to be dead set on turning the whole thing upside down by monkeying with the very air all of life breathes! So if we want to keep glorious September days like this one appearing every time we hit this part of our annual trip around the sun it’s time to do whatever we can to get things right.

Thankfully, today is the kind of day that makes my mind strain at its moorings, to free itself to explore new ways of thought, to head off toward the horizon of its eye and explore uncharted waters. Today is the kind of crisp September day which makes me want to think with the clarity of its air and realize that my conceptual world is not as flat as it seems, that its horizon is really not the end of what there is and, as I hope and suspect, instead of that worn out image of an old guy with a beard reaching out to make stuff for his personal entertainment, the beyond reveals startling unimaginableness. Even if the success of such a mental voyage is a long shot, this is the kind of day which makes it feel right to give it a try.

Terracide

Posted on September 12, 2017 by rpetermogielnicki under Uncategorized

The Pillory at Charing Cross in Microcosm of London 1809

It is now nearly three decades since physicist James Hanson, then head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, warned the United States Senate in formal testimony of the dangers of continued CO2 emissions . The mountains of supportive evidence accumulated since then is surely enough to convince any reasonably thoughtful person of the urgency of the problem. In spite of this a recent Yale University survey found that 30% of Americans continue to deny that the earth is warming and 45 % deny that human activity is a major contributor.

Those deniers, I believe, fall into three categories The majority are likely those never adequately exposed to critical thinking. Many come from disadvantaged backgrounds – poor schooling, family dysfunction, lack of mentors or role models, economic hardship – all colluding to give daily survival and momentary pleasure precedence over learning the skill of thinking things through or carefully considering the sources of information. Others are unfortunate in very different ways, living lives so privileged, thanks to the work and good luck of forbears, that it is simply a fact of life that good things happen – the refrigerator is always full, college admission comes as a result of family philanthropy, inheritance is carefully tended by “wealth managers” who magically open doors to “the goals you set”. There is no need for critical thinking on their part either.

But there is a small, sinister third group who, for reasons of rank self-interest, have used their wealth and/or power to sponsor a sophisticated campaign designed to convince others that talk of human-induced climate change is “fake science.” Experts in climatology are accused of grandstanding and industry-sponsored research is trotted out to support claims that the issue is not yet settled. Without the disinformation campaign paid for and promoted by this third group things would be different. Our country would still be a member of the Paris Climate Accord, the fraction of our energy coming from green sustainable methods like sun and wind would be much greater and we would be rivalling Europe in the speed of our pivot away from fossil fuels. But instead the Denial Bogeyman thrives.

The crime presently being committed by those wealthy and powerful individuals who have been leading the charge merits adoption of a new word. “Terracide” comes to mind.. Though the term has cropped up now and then ( The Hammer of God by Arthur C.Clark, 1993; Ethics for a Small Planet, by Daniel C. Maguire & Larry L. Rasmussen 1998; Greenstone Rising by Andrea Wright 2013), it has yet to have achieved wide enough usage to merit an entry in the Merriam-Webster online or print Dictionary). Nonetheless, it surely deserves more widespread use. For unless the by-now highly improbable happens and humanity is able to drastically reduce its CO2 production, the heinousness of this crime will surely surpass mere genocide as not only millions of humans die of disease, displacement and famine but in addition untold numbers of other living species and whole ecosystems disappear forever. Like the perpetrators of genocide, however, many of the influential leaders of denial will try to slink into the shadows and scrub history of their complicity. I think they deserve something different.

Though the concept of “war crimes” can be traced from the 1400’s, it took nearly 600 years for a widely agreed upon legal definition of inappropriate wartime behavior to be formally codified at the Hague Conventions of the early twentieth century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crime. And despite the fact that “crimes against humanity” was a phrase introduced to describe actions taken by Leopold II in the Congo Free State in 1890 and was used frequently in the war crime trials following both world wars, codification of such a crime in international law has not yet occurred. So there is no reason to imagine that there will be conventional legal tools to punish perpetrators of terracide within the foreseeable future. Indeed, there is not even a way to assure that history, as it unfolds, will appropriately vilify the major leaders of the denial conspiracy.

Fortunately, there are many well-intentioned ongoing efforts to discredit this group of climate criminals. Non-profits like 350.org, the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, the Audubon Society, the Union of Concerned Scientists and many others have all fought back. Not surprisingly, many of these organizations have a long history of other types of environmental protection but sadly this is like waving a red flag in front of the bulls of industry and those espousing less government intervention on any front. The arguments raised in support of climate science are also, paradoxically, undercut by their reliance on detailed careful research and sophisticated modeling – epistemological methods many of the deniers…….well…… simply deny. So if facts and reason are ineffective, and there is no reason to expect deterrence to come from a threat of punishment imposed through a national or global legal system perhaps we might consider public shaming.

Shaming is hardly new. Among the better known examples – albeit a fictional rendition – is the punishment undeservedly meted out to Hester Prynn for adultery in The Scarlet Letter. But public humiliation as punishment goes back a long way. Dr. Mathew Green, author of London, a Travel Guide Through Time notes a variety of shaming techniques in medieval London including shaming parades, scold’s bridles, cucking stools and pillories. Dr. Green reports use of the latter for a variety of specific crimes including “conjuring, fraud, blasphemy, perjury, slander, attempted sodomy, and spreading false news……” (bold italics mine!) . Shaming by pillory was hardly restricted to the dark ages or to the Old World. A public pillorying apparently occurred in Delaware in 1901. And in modern academic journals of law there is ongoing discussion of shaming as an appropriate form of punishment and deterrence.

Shaming certainly deserves consideration as punishment and deterrence for the perpetrators of denial but it would be ideal if, at the same time, we preserved for future generations the identities of the powerful and wealthy who still are obfuscating the science and dragging around red herrings – even now as record storms pummel our coasts, species disappear at a dizzying rate and the planet’s temperature marches upwards. Here is a modest proposal.

Visualize a Mount Rushmore-scale rock carving – done, of course on private, property and paid for by a crowd-funding campaign drawing from the millions of citizens dismayed by what the eminences grises behind climate denial have done. There, in gigantic scale, the visages of Donald Trump, Scott Pruitt, Rick Perry and Edward Koch would stare wide-eyed out at a fitting barren desert landscape – beads of sweat prominently carved on their brows, handkerchiefs mopping their foreheads as stylized flames lick up from the surrounding earth giving the setting a hellish ambiance. Carved into the rock beneath each towering diaphoretic bust would be a memorable quote. “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Donald Trump: November 2012. “I would not agree that it’s (CO2’s) a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.” Scott Pruitt: March 2014. “China and India are going to do what they’re going to do anyway. So we just hurt ourselves, even under their theory. And their theories aren’t working very well, because they keep predicting all these theories that aren’t happening..”Charles Koch: June 2016 . “…..this idea that science is just absolutely settled and if you don’t believe it’s settled then somehow you’re another Neanderthal, that is so inappropriate from my perspective.” Rick Perry: June, 2017. “The problem is that we don’t understand what the effects [of climate change] are. There are no models that exist…” Ryan Zinke June 2017

Such a monument will at least preserve the identities of some of the key perpetrators of terracide and who knows, the shame it communicates might even begin to have some deterrent effect as the steadily mounting evidence for major human-induced climate change becomes more and more undeniable.

Words, Coming and Going

Posted on August 9, 2017 by rpetermogielnicki under Uncategorized

As a grandfather, I now regret my misguided childhood indifference to the snippets of my own grandparents’ talk about being taught Polish grammar in their basement. They had been born in Poland in the late 1800’s – a time when their homeland had been “disappeared” under the welter of partitions of the previous century. Their basement home schooling was a response to the criminalization of the use or instruction of their native tongue – one of many efforts by Tsar Alexander II to Russify the Polish Slavs . If only they were alive today, how I would be pressing them for details!

Of course using the eradication of a language as a weapon to murder a culture isn’t something restricted to countries other than our own. In a recent edition of Orion magazine – that wonderful ad-free chronicler of the natural world – Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of her Potawatomi grandfather being sent to the Carlisle Indian School of US Cavalry officer Captain Richard Henry Pratt at around the same time the Tsar was busy throttling Polish. There, children were forbidden from using the Potowotami language as part of the school’s avowed purpose, in the founder’s own words, as a means to “kill the indian and save the man.” To Pratt’s credit, he was among a minority of conquering Americans who did not consider native Americans to be ‘subhumans’ and is credited with being one of the first people to use the term ‘racism’ in a pejorative sense to criticize policies of racial segregation . But his willingness to blame the native American way of life while apparently believing in the individual native American’s biological equality bespeaks the complexity of issues of nature vs. nurture.

Kimmerer goes on to explore ways English and Potowotami portray different views of the relationship between man and the rest of the world – perhaps best exemplified by the familiar pronouns ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘it’. In English the two former are reserved almost exclusively for fellow human beings and the last for nearly everything else. The Potawatomi tongue, however, avoids pronouns and relies more on verbs and word placement in their stead. Verbs come in two forms, one which relates to inanimate objects (‘it’ in English) but the other for animate ones. As a result, humans stand on equal footing with flora and fauna and even, possibly, some important rocks. As Kimmerer so eloquently puts it:

“You hear a blue jay with a different verb than you hear an airplane, distinguishing that which possesses the quality of life from that which is a mere object (italics are mine). Birds, bugs and berries are spoken of with the same respectful grammar as humans are, as if we were all members of the same family. Because we are. There is no it for nature…………..personhood is extended to all who breathe and some who don’t. I greet the silent boulder people with the same respect as I do the talkative chickadee.”

Kimmerer takes her thoughts two steps further. In one she explores ways in which blurring the bright English linguistic line between humans and the rest might ameliorate the harm done by the extractive, capitalization-heavy foundation of much of modern Western civilization. In the other she considers replacing ‘he’ and ‘she’ as well as ‘it’ with the word ‘ki’. Then she reflects on how this might even help us be more humble and worshipful when we exploit a natural resource or take a non-human life. (It might also, it seems to me, serve to defuse some of our counterproductive gender conflicts.)

Authoritarian linguicide, however, is not the only way cultures and worldviews can be eradicated. Robert Macfarlane in his wordly-wise book, Landmarks, explores historical word disappearance and reflects on how this may mirror or influence our thinking. In the process he reports that the Oxford Junior Dictionary’s newest edition has made some telling, and to my mind sinister, substitutions:

“Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, and willow. The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player, and voice-mail.”

The logic behind the editors’ choices is clear and largely driven by modern usage, but the implications give one pause, or at least should. Aside from frequency of use those new introductions are all products of the human brain with all its limitations and distortions. Somebody or somebodies had an idea and that drove each word’s creation. But the deleted words had a different origin. Somebody standing under an oak got bopped on the head by something, or was gathering nutlike things to grind into flour, or saw a squirrel running off with something in ki’s (sic) mouth and needed a word to describe the object. The real meaning, the full meaning, the comprehensive meaning of the thing the word ‘acorn’ stands for is enormously – perhaps infinitely – complex and ranges from the genetic code it contains, the symmetry and biochemistry of the acorn itself, the magnificent oak tree it has the potential to produce etc., etc. And those new introductions? I’ll admit some of them are kind of complicated. I can’t begin to explain how broadband works. But there are lots of people who can and some body or some team of somebodies thought it up and got it to work. Every one of those new introductions signify the physical manifestations of someone’s idea and therefore are entirely limited by the creative imagination of a mere person. The word ‘acorn’ and all those other deletions signify the creative imagination of something very else.

Weaponizing the eradication of a language to murder a culture may be more sinister than the Oxford editors’ actions. But the consequences – unintended or not – are similar. The Oxford Junior Dictionary’s linguistic move forebodes an eradication of awareness of the natural world through death by a thousand cuts. As an act of resistance, when my grandchildren come to visit I plan to take them down to the basement and talk to them about acorns, newts and otters.

Spring Miracles

Posted on May 5, 2017 by rpetermogielnicki under Uncategorized

Early spring! Winter’s bleak landscape is airbrushed with a haze of soft greens and reds. Vital forces pulse from underground roots, pushing leaves out of their winter hibernacula. Birdsong cracks through months of silence and the air itself shimmers with new life. To the outwardly-oriented, biophilic member of our species the spring’s miracles can be overwhelming. Why have so many cultures felt a need to embellish them?

Ancient Egyptians had their god, Osiris, murdered by his brother, Set, and his body carved into pieces. Osiris’ mourning wife collected and reassembled them (except for one vital member for which she had a golden prosthesis made!) and then miraculously brought her husband back to life long enough to have him use it to sire their son, Horus, after which Osiris redied – but only after regaining control of the seasons of growth and harvest. The Phrygians had their god of vegetation, Attis, bleed to death after castrating himself (as a religious act) or, in a less gruesome version, killed by a boar, and then get resurrected as a sacred pine tree – an event celebrated by them each spring by an orgiastic festival. Ancient Greeks had Persephone – sentenced to remain in the underworld each year for one month per pomegranate seed she had consumed while held hostage there by Hades, after which she could return to earth and bring spring to the land. A Hopi story explains that winter is transformed into spring because a young girl sacrificed her beloved Kachina doll at the request of the great spirit who then resurrects the doll in the form of legions of bluebonnet flowers. And for Judeo-Christians, the two key holidays – Passover and Easter- with their associated miracles just happen to fall right when spring is beginning.

Stories and metaphors like these compete with the real miracle for our attention. Instead of reciting the tired stories of the Creator visiting ten plagues on the Egyptians and then parting the Red Sea, or arranging for His son’s execution and subsequent resurrection, why not enthrall us with a tale of how the earth was spun, top-like, on its tilted axis during the birth of our solar system. Then delve into the details of how this miraculously results in increasing daylength and rising temperatures, resurrecting life in uncountable trillions of tree buds, triggering powerful hormonal changes in birds, sending great schools of fish northward and causing humans to arise from their winter torpor and go out into their gardens!

Then again, some of our great poets can’t seem to get it straight either. In the final stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium”, William Butler Yeats fantasizes about how he hopes to be resurrected:

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Translated, Yeats is saying that when he dies he wants to be resurrected as an artificial bird rather than a living one. It’s quite extraordinary – preferring to be recreated (not reincarnated which, after all, means becoming flesh) as a piece of painted gold rather than something with the intricate workings of a living creature! No humming mitochondria, no pumping heart, no oxygen molecules hitching and unhitching from hemoglobin, no hormonal surges, no genetic maps of migration routes – just a banged on painted-over piece of the most inert of metals. Instead of soaring above the earth on summer thermals, probing nectar from sun-dappled flowers, plunging toward prey in a 200 mile per hour powerdive, Yeats wants to sing mechanically to some elites.

Granted, he pleads his case in hypnotically poetic language, but his case is not for me. And to be fair, “Sailing to Byzantium” is a lament about the process of aging and death and he sees this golden artifice as something with more permanence than his “bodily form”. But wouldn’t it have been sweeter if Yeats had used his poetic gifts to celebrate the way, when our physical selves die, our parts are recomposed into new life, so eloquently described by proponents of the Urban Death Project.

From what I understand, Yeats never visited the Harvard Museum of Natural History, but had he, he no doubt would have been enthralled by the Ware collection of glass flowers. In it, glass replicas of 830 botanical species are visited yearly by over 200,000 people – each of whom is willing to ante up $12 to do so. How many of those visitors, you might ask, would spend $12 and an equivalent amount of time looking closely at a far greater number of botanical species in the nearby Mount Auburn Cemetery? And those living botanical miracles are orders of magnitude more intricately fashioned than the Blashkas’ glass replicas. Not only that, one can touch them, watch insects pollinate them, observe how they grow day by day and even inhale their fragrance!

Who needs a golden phallus when you can have hummingbirds and bees! They not only procreate but in addition fly! And then not just fly but soar for months over the open ocean or travel twice a year between arctic and antarctic circles. Having the Red Sea part so you can get to the other side pales in comparison.

But one can rightfully ask “what difference does it make?” Why not let people believe what they want and be entertained in the process. All that nature stuff is so commonplace. Folks need something you don’t bump into every day. But it does make a difference, and here’s why.

There was a sea of signs at the recent Climate March reminding us that “There is no Planet B”. And while the estimates vary widely, most ecologists agree that the current species extinction rate is manyfold greater than the historical baseline – observations which have led many to describe the present era as the sixth great extinction, a phenomenon carefully documented in Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-winning book by the same name. Yet the health of a nation is still estimated by its economic growth, a decline of which is sure to doom any incumbent politician. And unless the metrics are mightily rearranged, economic growth translates into more resource extraction, more asphalt, more concrete, more plastic bits in the ocean and more energy consumption. If a way could be found to rechannel the energy and passion devoted to those old stories, if it could be redirected to worship the real miracles bursting around us every day, the chances of turning things around would improve dramatically. If clearcutting a stand of old growth trees for lumber or turning a rainforest into an oil palm plantation were condemnable as blasphemy with the same energy as was expended by those who railed against Andres Serrano’s controversial photographs, the chances of slowing the gradual impoverishment of life on earth would significantly improve.

Much of the Old Testament is devoted to rooting out “false gods” by either converting pagans or eradicating them. I’m not advocating anything like that. In fact, with a little reinterpretation and modernization some of those old stories are fine. Adam and Eve’s punishment for eating of the Tree of Knowledge was expulsion from the garden of Eden. It is not a stretch to imagine that this actually means that mankind’s hubristic overuse of technological innovation without consideration of downstream damage – think DDT, PCB’s, mercury, chlorofluorocarbons, neonicotinoids, Chernobyl, Fukushima, plastic miocrobeads etc etc. – will be punished by our own loss of the Edenestic qualities of our planet.

In the New Testament, the Easter story includes this extraordinary plea from a man dying on a cross. “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” Redirect those words to Mother Nature and we have a powerful and poetic description of the crucial challenges facing our modern world.

Do Facts Merit a Taxonomy?

Posted on April 5, 2017 by rpetermogielnicki under Uncategorized

Tyco Brae’s instrument for measuring the angle between celestial objects.

There’s been a fair amount of discussion lately about alternate facts. I don’t have anything to add to that conversation that hasn’t already been said, but it has gotten me thinking about another kind of fact – namely “scientific” ones. Truth be told, that phrase always sets my teeth on edge. Here’s why.

Is there something about a scientific fact that makes it, unlike other facts, require an adjective? Does being a scientific fact make a fact more or less believable than some other kind?

I suppose there are non-scientific facts. If I awaken in the morning with a headache, that surely is a fact for me, though not really a scientific one. And the kind of facts historians work to document are not usually referred to as “scientific” ones – unless, of course, they are unearthed using some special techniques such as documentation of a past poisoning by chemical analysis of an exhumed body. Then so and so’s death by poisoning would rise (or fall) to the level of scientific fact.

But a scientific fact is a fact, plain and simple. Unfortunately I think that for many, calling a fact a scientific one describes a phenomenon or cause and effect relationship not immediately accessible to all. It might be a truth uncovered with the help of some kind of complex sensing device that identifies things beyond our five senses – think electron microscope, pH meter, volt meter, x-ray telescope – things like that. But there are other kinds. Surely Gregor Mendel had no more fancy instruments than paper and a quill pen in his studies of pea genetics which revealed previously unrecognized ground-breaking facts. All he did was make multiple systematic observations in his monastery’s garden, carefully record and organize them and think logically about what he had observed.

And then there are the kind of facts that emerge from varying specific conditions and observing the result. An example that comes to mind is mixing antibodies (the chemicals our bodies make to fight infection) with antigens (a substance – usually a protein – that is not one made by the same organism creating the antibodies). If one begins to add antibodies to a solution of antigen nothing happens initially. As more antibody is added a cloudy precipitate forms as the antibodies combine with the antigen and are no longer kept in solution,. But if still more antigen is added the precipitate re-dissolves. Discovering that kind of antigen-antibody binding relationship by systematically changing the mixing ratios was important in unravelling how immune systems work.

What these examples have in common is that they reveal realities not immediately apparent to the casual bystander. Of course, when such findings appear for the first time on our intellectual radar they can cause trouble. Unfortunately, as the sensing devices become more complex, the observations more numerous and the logic of interpreting them more involved it becomes easier to reject the findings either because they fly in the face of previously held beliefs or they inconveniently threaten vested interests.

In his eagerly anticipated annual lab session on chemical energy my 11th grade science teacher held a match under a hydrogen-filled balloon. The shock wave from the resulting explosion nearly blew his glasses off. The class applauded. Mr. Kilgour had made his point. Science was cool! A few weeks later he convened the class after dark one evening to watch the reflected light of Sputnik – the Soviet Union’s first-in-the-world satellite – as it orbited Earth. That clinched it. I was going to be a physicist.

But college sophomore physics convinced me otherwise. Courses in Quantum Mechanics and Probability, Statistics and Random Error separated sheep from goats and I was definitely a goat. Struggling over those equations and laboring long into the night to solve the problems was humbling. I could get through most eventually, but for some of my classmates it came quite naturally. I passed, all right, though my colors were definitely at half mast and I did learn some important things.

For one, those courses were usually accompanied by hands-on lab exercises where one learned how meticulously conditions had to be controlled to get consistent results. Those labs also made clear that one could prove the correctness of an idea by performing an action which depended on it. Like so many of his ideas, Galileo’s intuition that the gravitational force acting on an object was independent of the object’s mass was greeted with skepticism by many. Today an introductory physics lab can easily demonstrate its veracity by dropping a feather and a lead ball in a glass tube from which all the air has been evacuated and watching them hit the bottom at precisely the same time. The right action performed carefully under the right conditions turn a theory into a fact – one of many such facts that allowed mankind to walk on the moon and launch a rocket from earth to land a motorized vehicle on the surface of Mars!

And one of the other things those science classes taught me was that science comes in many different flavors: be it combining or separating materials as in chemistry, measuring the way matter and energy interact as in physics, systematically observing life forms as in biology or combining these modalities as in biochemistry or physical chemistry. And most rewarding of all is when different methods of seeking truth converge, as they did when Mendel’s observations of pea characteristics fell into place with Watson and Crick’s biochemical unravelling of DNA’s double helix and the two fit elegantly with Darwin’s observations of natural selection – creating a set of harmonies as beautiful as Bach’s “B Minor Mass” or, if you prefer, The Beatle’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.

This convergence of different scientific disciplines on the same slice of reality from multiple different perspectives is what might be called “settled” science. Sadly, a recent poll in England found that 35% of the population felt that scientific findings are adjusted to give the answers a researcher wants and nearly as many think research is never, or only occasionally, checked by other scientists. The wrongness of these beliefs is clear to anyone who has submitted an article to an established peer reviewed scientific journal. The unblinking critique one gets back from the journal’s editors pointing out every possible weakness of the data and the conclusions drawn from them makes clear how very far off the mark those beliefs are! Similar survey information doesn’t seem to be available for the US but given our current political dialogue it is hard to believe the numbers would be any different. And these are polls from countries with highly educated populations!

So let’s face it. All facts are bits of verifiable truth, plain and simple. To describe something as a scientific fact is a redundancy. It is a superfluity. It is a prolixitous pleonasm. It is longwinded logorrhea! It is like saying something is a cow cow or a chair chair to distinguish them some other kinds of cows or chairs.

And what is most sinister, it frames the concept in a way which can imply a hierarchy of facts. In fact (sic), it paves the way for that most oxymoronic of oxymorons – the alternative fact!

All things considered, then, I think it’s time to do away with subcategorizing facts. Other beliefs or beliefs expressed as words might be called hunches, suspicions, guesses, best judgements, feelings, impressions, conjectures, inklings, ideas, notions, intuitions, or instincts but let’s agree to let the word “fact” stand on its own. Let’s keep it free of modifiers that create the dangerous impression that on any given subject there are a cluster of different kinds of facts from which one is free to choose a favorite out of which to construct one’s beliefs

Cereflections

From cerebral as in "appealing to intellectual appreciation" and reflections as in "something produced by reflecting."

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Joy