The cosmopolitan ecologist

Umberto Eco’s new collection of essays, entitled “Turning back the clock: hot wars and media populism,” is a mixed bag. Some of the essays are so specific to particular moments in Italian politics that they are hard for Americans to understand. Some are fun and amusing but aren’t of much lasting interest. Some, however, are masterpieces of the genre.

One of the best essays is called “The wolf and the lamb: The rhetoric of oppression.” The centerpiece of the essay is the fable of the wolf and the lamb who happened to approach a river at the same time, looking for a drink. The wolf accuses the lamb of various offences, including muddying the water of the stream, all of which the lamb rhetorically refutes (the lamb is actually downstream of the wolf, for example). Having lost the rhetorical battle, the wolf goes ahead and devours the lamb anyway. Eco then goes on to discuss the various types of political discourse that is the political equivalent, including the United States’ series of arguments justifying an Iraq war that had already been decided on.

I thought about this as I read Dana Milbank’s excellent piece in the Washington Post this AM. Milbank describes the absurd series of arguments used by a set of Republicans to argue that: 1.) Barack Obama is not born in the United States (there’s a claim his Hawaiian birth certificate is fake, which pisses me off as it looks just as real as my Hawaiian birth certificate!), 2.) if he were born in the United States he still isn’t eligible for presidency (a murky vague claim that because he could have technically claimed dual US-Kenyan citizenship, that invalidates his citizen rights as a natural born US citizens), and 3.) if he were eligible he’s too morally corrupt for the job. This seems to me the same rhetorical trick of the wolf, or at least a similar one: the outcome (vehement opposition to Obama) is determined prior to the rhetorical argument. Maybe lawyers and PR men are comfortable with this state of affairs, but scientists are not- if debate is not between two sides who are willing to honestly consider that they are wrong, it’s not scientific, and it’s not much of a debate.

Posted by ecologist at 08:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

David Frum’s recent piece in the New York Times Magazine is fascinating and worth reading. His central contention is that wealth and income inequality cause voters to be, on average, more likely to be Democrats. The only problem with this elegant thesis is that the data suggest it is statistically meaningless. I had meant to write a letter to the NY Times Magazine outlining the flaws in Frum’s argument, but the birth of my son intervened and kept me busy! I post these thoughts here in hopes of starting an online conversation about the issue.

The first flaw of Frum’s analysis is simply that the relationship between wealth and party affiliation is rather weak. Frum mentioned wealthy zip codes as being “a roll call of Democratic strongholds.” I couldn’t find data on voting patterns by zip code, so instead I analyzed data at the county-level. Out of the twenty richest counties in the US, the majority (13) voted for Bush more than Kerry. This is another kind of roll call Douglas County (CO), Loudon County (VA), and Hunterdon County (NJ) all were very wealthy and solidly Republican. It is true, on average that wealthier countries vote more Democratic, but just barely: each $10000 increase in median family income increased the vote to Kerry by 0.8%. What’s more, this relationship only explains 0.3% of the total variation in voting pattern, making it essentially worthless for prediction.

The situation is similar for Frum’s assertion that places with great income inequality tend to vote Democratic. Out of the 20 countries with the greatest income inequality, Bush won 7, places like Greene County (GA), Summit County (UT), and Lake County (IL). For each 10% increase in the share of income controlled by the rich, the vote for Kerry increased on average by the 5%. While I recognize that in politics this is perhaps a significant trend, more than 90% of the total variation in voting patterns remains unexplained.

Most grave is Frum’s assertion that inequality somehow causes people to vote Democratic, making Republican policies that tend to increase income inequality rather damaging to Republican Party interests. There simply is little support for this assertion. Correlation is not causation. Bigger cities have both more churches and more bars than small cities, but that does not mean churches drive people to drink! Similarly, cities may on average have greater income inequality than rural areas, simply because the very rich and the very poor move there in search of opportunity, and cities may vote Democratic more, but that does not necessarily mean the two are related. By the same logic, one could argue that since less education is correlated with voting Republican, a lack of schooling causes people to vote Republican, an argument I’m sure Mr. Frum finds repugnant.

Posted by ecologist at 11:18 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been reading Bulfinch’s classical mythology recently. I picked it up partly because of the Bulfinch name, so famous in Boston for the elder Bulfinch’s role in the city’s architecture (although I do find the Boston Brahmin puritanical nature of the younger Bulfinch’s translation kind of comical). I’ve been impressed, as I read various myths, how many of the names are familiar: Hercules and the labors, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Echo and Narcissus, Daedalus and Icarus, and all the rest.

These stories give me such joy, and I hope I remember a few of them well enough to retell to my children. I have a great deal of trouble, however, imagining how it must have been to truly believe in these stories, rather than just finding them quaint and beautiful. How would it have felt to walk through a forest and feel that certain trees were dryads and hence had a soul? How would the Greeks have treated a spring of water, given that they assumed a spirit inhabited it? Such ideas seem absurd to modern minds, and certainly they aren’t true in a scientific sense, but they must have at least made the world a personal place, one where personalities determine your fate rather than impersonal chance.

Posted by ecologist at 09:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In preparation of my move to the District, I picked up Gore Vidal’s novel Washington, DC. It’s the most subtle and complete description I’ve ever read of our nation’s capitol. I think it captures perfectly the odd dual nature of the city, part southerners who live there permanently and part itinerant politicians floating in from (what DC views as) the hinterlands.

Despite the numerous entertaining romances and scandals that fill its pages, the book is fundamentally a meditation on the nature of power, both political and economic. The most significant conversation comes when a young, naïve, yet power-hungry senator’s aide talks to an old, wealthy newspaper publisher. The older man Blaise says bluntly “What matters is I have power and you want it,” to which the young Clay replies “Not your sort, no.” Blaise’s final retort sets the tone for the rest of the book: “All sorts are the same, as you’ll discover.”

Every character in the book has some good traits, and honestly believes they are doing good for society in Washington- the author is even optimistic enough to acknowledge that some of the characters really have done some good during their careers. Yet at the same time every character makes ethical compromises to get more power, always with the rationalization that when that power arrives they will start doing good again. For most of the men in the novel, tragically the end of their career arrives before they get around to actually doing good.

Despite the utter pessimism of this worldview, the author gives us a somewhat happy ending. For at least one character love of another human being becomes a way to forget the meaningless of the struggle of power. The love of fighting for or against a simple truth is worth the effort, if only because it makes your political life seem meaningful. It is an enigmatic ending of existential happiness, and one that I keep rereading hoping to understand it better.

Posted by ecologist at 07:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Recently on a whim I picked up my copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism. For this 25th anniversary edition of the book Said wrote a new Preface, with the events of September 11th and the Iraq war in his mind. The result seems to me today to be one of the best Prefaces I’ve ever read. Two passages in the first paragraph strike me as beautiful. First, he makes a self-mocking comment about “the necessary diminutions in expectations and pedagogic zeal that usually frame the road to seniority.” Second, he writes of the will to go on in the face of adversity not as “a matter of being optimistic, but rather of continuing to have faith in the ongoing and literately unending process of emancipation and enlightenment that… frames and gives direction to the intellectual vocation.”

This is a stirring declaration of the purpose of academia and intellectual life which I can say from experience is absent from many faculty (but not all, by any means). What he essentially does in the rest of the Preface is contrast this search for truth from the stories that sheer ideology would tell. His point is that the US approached its adventure in Iraq in much the same way the French and the British mentally thought about the “Orient, … that semi-mythical construct, which … has been made and remade countless times by power acting through an expedient form of knowledge to assert that this is the Orients nature, and we must deal with it accordingly.”

In the end, Said is making a last stand for the intellectual vocation as humanism, as a search for truth. And in essence he is admitting that in the US today we are losing that battle: “Reflection, debate, rational argument, moral principle based on a secular notion that human beings must create their own history have been replaced by abstract ideas that celebrate American or Western exceptionalism, denigrate the relevance of context, and regard other cultures with derisive contempt.” What I love about the essay is that Said is simultaneously attacking American exceptionalism and postmodernism as both being incompatible with the search for truth.

Posted by ecologist at 09:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Paul Hawken’s new book, entitled Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, makes a simple argument in a straightforward fashion. This makes the book infinitely more readable than another book that makes a similar argument in incomprehensible poetic prose, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt . The only problem with the clarity of Hawken’s argument is that it brings into full relief its deficiencies.

The book begins by chronicling the rapid rise of the NGO, both in sheer numbers and in political power. Somehow, this multitude of NGOs is part of “The Movement”, heading toward a consistent vision of a better world. Hawken makes an analogy to an immune system, where thousands of different cells each do one tiny thing and together the whole system creates a collective property called “immunity.” Another analogy (which Hawken doesn’t make) would be the similarity to free market economies, where thousands of firms each independently just try to make money but overall the system achieves “efficiency”. The clear message of the book is that even if only a small percentage of NGOs achieve their goals, they will help further “The Movement”.

In a sense, this kind of argument is motivated by the desire of progressives to believe we can win in the absence of a single unifying ideology. The principle problem with the argument is the fuzzy concept of a “Movement”. The diversity of NGOs is staggering, and I don’t see any real coherent goal that they all share. In fact, many more conservative NGOs (which presumably express at least somewhat real desires by real people) are working at cross-purposes with more liberal NGOs.

It’s much better to think of this explosion of NGOs as simply the birth of a global civil society. Just as we don’t expect consensus in a republic among all the elected representative, since their constituents are too diverse, neither should we expect consensus among NGOs. There’s a word for this explosion of NGOs, and it’s not “Movement”, it’s “Democracy”.

Posted by ecologist at 02:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

    I never expected to read this book. But my mom left a copy of Michael Crichton’s book State of Fear at my house, and I found myself reading it. The book is an odd mix of fiction and pseudo-scientific argument.
    As a fiction piece, it’s actually okay. For reasons that are irrelevant to the plot, evil villains are trying to shear a big iceberg off into the ocean, create a flash flood in a canyon, and make a tidal wave hit LA. The good guys are of course trying to stop them, and manage to stop them just in time. Crichton’s a good writer, and this book is fun to read. For a Crichton book, though, it is one of his worst, and nowhere near as entertaining as Andromeda Strain. Mostly this is because his rhetorical goal for the novel continually gets in the way of the plot.
    The central argument of the book seems to be: “It’s not clear global warming is caused by people, and even if it is it’s not clear how bad it’ll be, therefore we should do nothing.” The evil villain of the book is a cabal of environmental groups determined to scare the populace to maintain funding for the military-industrial complex in the post- Cold War world. Global warming is thus fundamentally a hoax perpetrated by tens of thousands of people, in Crichton’s view. Even better, they all manage to keep the hoax secret. Apart from errors of fact, of which there are several, the book also makes several serious errors in its reasoning.
    First is the widespread use of anecdotal reasoning. For instance (and yes, I see the irony here), Crichton makes a big deal about how the warmest year on record in the US was 1934. Whether of not this is true depends on how you calculate average temperature, but it doesn’t really matter- 1934 was really warm. But, fifteen out of the 25 warmest yeats since records started being kept in 1895 have occurred after 1981. Globally, the trend toward warmness is even stronger. Particular anecdotes are irrelevant; in a large enough body of data or a large enough collection of papers you can find a factoid to support almost anything.
    Second is the intentional misrepresentation of scientific uncertainty by Crichton. For example, he talks about how global circulation models are uncertain about how increases in temperature will affect cloud cover and hence albedo. This is true, there is uncertainty on this point, but it doesn’t necessarily follow logically that everything about the model is wrong. When I estimate that a townhouse in Cambridge costs $350,000 to $500,000, I have some uncertainty in my estimate, but that does not imply the true value if zero. When the IPCC says the net radiative forcing of human activities on climate is +0.6 to +2.4 W/m2, there is some uncertainty in that estimate, but that does not imply the true value is zero.
    Finally, Crichton has misunderstood how science works. The process of peer review is a blind review of the facts cited in a paper, exactly the opposite of how Crichton portrays it. There is intense competition in science, with multiple groups analyzing the same data, exactly what Crichton calls for. Sadly, Crichton’s book of fiction was not peer reviewed, nor did he face any competition from competing scientific interpretations of the literature about global warming, which allowed this travesty of a rant to be published.

Posted by ecologist at 11:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It’s always great to pick up a new work by an author and realize he’s done exactly what you hoped he would do. Such was my feeling when I started reading Joseph Stiglitz’s new book, written with Andrew Charlton.

In Stiglitz’s last work, entitled Making Globalization Work, he mostly rehashed criticism from Globalization and its Discontents, leading to my bad review. Basically, he detailed why current patterns of globalization aren’t working, and stopped there.

Finally, in the most recent piece, Fair Trade for All, Stiglitz gets down to details: If he were benevolent emperor of the world, how would he run the WTO and the next round of negotiations? The book actually ventures into lots of messy, policy-wonkish details, so readers without a basic knowledge of economics might be a bit lost. All this messiness is actually kind of liberating to read: an economist actually arguing (with data) that particular countries and cultures require particular development strategies, not some grand philosophy a la “The Washington Consensus”. It reminds me a bit of Jeffery Sachs’ concept of “clinical economics”.

I can’t pretend to pass judgment on all of Stiglitz and Charlton’s suggestions, for I’m not an economist. The central argument is that in a true “Development Round” of WTO negotiations, proposals should maximize gains to poorer countries. Provocatively, they argue that “all WTO members commit themselves to providing free market access in all good to all developing countries poorer and smaller than themselves.” This is, of course, the complete opposite of the current unjust trading system. As a corollary, they present good evidence that it is mainly via increased South-South trade that least developed countries can lift themselves up.

At one point in a parenthetical statement they express regrets about the inclusion of “the infamous Chapter 11 of Nafta” (i.e., foreign firms can sue and win if a country reduces their profit via a regulation, even a totally reasonable one), essentially implying that trade negotiators put it in with Stiglitz and others approving. Anyone out there know if this historically substantiated?

Posted by ecologist at 04:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I just finished Vaclav Havel’s memoir, To the Castle and Back, and the harsh feelings I had towards the book as I began it dissipated a bit by the end. It has an odd structure, equal parts an interview done concerning events before he was president, memos he wrote while he was president, and recollections he wrote some years after he left office, all interspersed randomly among each other, with occasional repetitions of texts. As a biography, it’s a failure. By the end of the book, I still know little of the history of the Czech Republic, or what Havel did while in office. Readers looking for that should go to Havel’s book, Disturbing the Peace. That book remains one of the most influential books I’ve ever read, and I still count myself as lucky for stumbling on it in a friend’s bookshelf.

As a piece of literature, though, To the Castle is a success. Fundamentally, it casts Havel (and all writers and activists) as a sort of postmodern Sisyphus. He writes in depth and at length about his difficulty getting motivated and starting to write. He write, to the point of being whiney, about his intense doubt that his writing and political projects will ever achieve their high objectives. Indeed, he seems to argue that writing is fundamentally futile: “man will carry the complete truth about himself to the grave.” And yet Havel write, driven on by the “somewhat ridiculous” idea that “the world desperately needs the work in question, and will fall apart if it doesn’t appear.” I too like writing and thinking yet have intense self-doubt, and so I get great joy seeing that someone way more gifted than I like Havel suffers the same. I agree with Havel’s quote: “I sometimes ask myself whether I did not originally begin to write… only to overcome my essential experience of inappropriateness… in order to be able to live with those feelings.”

Yet somehow the Sisyphean task of the writer gives him meaning: “He simply tried to capture the world and himself more and more exactly through words, images, or actors, and the more he succeeds, the more aware he is that he can never completely capture either the world or himself… but that drives him to keep trying.” Imagine Sisyphus as conscious of the absurdity of his task, yet still drawing meaning from it. Camus would be proud.

This book is also a lament, for it is perhaps his last, and is certainly written as such. Havel is sending a message: he did his best to write himself into the world, but ultimately failed to communicate his internal self. Like a mortal Sisyphus in old age realizing he will never reach the top of this hill, nor could have.

Posted by ecologist at 08:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Quite by accident, I’ve read recently two autobiographies written in completely opposite styles, even though the lives of their subjects have some similarities.

Having visited South Africa, I of course had to buy a copy of Nelson Mandela’s A Long Walk to Freedom. It’s a powerful story, of a rural boy moving to a big city, becoming a freedom fighter, getting arrested and spending the next 20 or so years in jail, before ultimately emerging victorious and founding a new democracy. It’s told in a conventional way, in the first person, practically beginning “I was born in…” That actually makes it a gem to read, because the chronology sucks you in, the desire to know what happens next. It also left me much more educated about the history of the African National Conference and South Africa. What the book doesn’t do great is place one inside the head of Nelson Mandela, feeling for a moment the complex mixture of emotions that must have confronted him in prison. Rather, the narrator just says what he felt in a detailed but rather clinical tone.

I returned home and began reading Vaclav Havel’s new memoir, To the Castle and Back, which discusses his personal transition, from political prisoner under the communist regime to the president of a new democracy, and now to retiree. According to these three phases of his life, there are three types of narration, randomly interspersed: the transcript from an interview about his dissident days; bits of actual memos he wrote while president; and reflections from retirement written during a sabbatical in Georgetown. As a historical document, the biography fails; not even the basic chronology is clearly states, leaving the non-Czech reader totally confused. Perhaps that’s the point however. Havel says directly in several beautiful passages that while his life story after the fact has a certain simplicity, at no point during his life did it ever seem that way to him while he lived it. So, rather than seeing some of the epic speeches Havel wrote, we see his plaintive notes to friends who are late giving him comments on the first draft of said speeches. This book is a philosophically intriguing piece of prose, a biography that tries hard to kill the idea of a life’s narrative, and in the process leaves most of the facts a muddle. Still, one gets a good sense of what it was like to have experienced what he experienced, even if just for scattered instants.

Posted by ecologist at 03:06 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I spent last Friday, to my total surprise, sitting on an aircraft carrier in Boston Harbor. I arrived at 8am at a nondescript parking deck in the waterfront. All I knew was that I was the guest of my wife, who was to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen. We were forced to wait in an endless, but well ordered, line that snaked through multiple “staging areas,” finally passing through what may have been the most efficient security checkpoint I have ever seen. We then walked up a steep metal mesh gangplank, dangling over the waters and being buffeted by the winds. The women’s high heels all got stuck in the mesh. Once inside the relatively warm hanger bay of the USS John Kennedy, our long wait for the ceremony began.

 

More than 2 hours later, Edward Kennedy arrived and gave an admittedly excellent and moving speech. The symbolism, of the Senator who has worked so much for immigration reform speaking on a soon-to-be decommissioned ship named after his dead brother, was powerful. The rest of the ceremony was good, if a bit too cheesy for my tastes- the video montage accompanying the song “Proud to be an American” was over the top. Nevertheless, it was a happy and joyous day for all involved. I was certainly happy my wife could finally participate as a citizen in U.S. politics.

 

What stands out most about Friday was how well ordered the whole event was, in a way that civilian life never is. There was, however, one apparent oversight: bathrooms. Given that there were 600 civilians on the carrier, forgetting to think about how they will find the bathroom in the bowels of the ship seems a rather big oversight. To their credit, the Navy admirably and quickly came up with a solution: given each person a military escort to the bathroom.

 

Somehow this small oversight reminded me of an excellent book I am reading now, Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation. What is fascinating about the work is the feeling of actually being inside history, of seeing the messy process by which decisions are made. Stupid oversight and mistakes got made during Acheson’s tenure in the government, of far more import that some missing bathrooms on a boat. More importantly, the book makes you realize that history is not some process drive by impersonal forces like fate or destiny. Nor is it the story of single men leading movements. Rather, it is the complex outcome of a set of men and their personalities. To read Acheson is to realize that things could very well have turned out differently, if a different set of men had been there. And when history’s inevitable surprises happen, competence and a sharp comprehension of reality, trumps ideology everytime.

Posted by ecologist at 03:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One of the benefits of living in Cambridge are two gems of cinema, the Harvard Film Archive and the Brattle Theatre. I recently had a chance to catch a couple marvelous, quirky films at each location.

The Brattle had a cute little documentary called “Mr. Cat,” following the trend in Paris to make graffiti tags that look like an anime feline. I’d seen these things in a few places around the city, mostly along RER embankments. However, the filmmaker finds many more, and as he follows their appearance over time he reflects on all that has happened in the past several years: the attacks of September 11, the mass protests against the occupation of Iraq, and the subsequent occupation of the country anyway. It managed to make me laugh harder than I have in a while, and feel deep sorrow, quite an accomplishment for a film about a cartoon cat.

At the Harvard Film Archive my wife and I caught Jacques Rivette’s classic film, “La belle noiseuse.” It’s a charmingly referential film: an aging director (Rivette) attempts to film a masterpiece by telling the story of an aging artist who wants to finally finish painting his masterpiece. To do that, he pressures the young lover of a young photographer to pose nude for him. This causes all kinds of jealousy (the 4 hour film has plenty of time for interpersonal relationships to sort themselves out). The bulk of the film, however, simply shows the artist painting his muse, and the clash of wills between them. One enjoyable aspect of the film is how female nudity, which usually in cinema is just a prelude to a sex scene, ceases to be about titillation but becomes instead simply about beauty. At the end of the film the artist realizes his masterpiece, which is a beautiful but not psychologically flattering portrait of the girl, deeply offending her. There’s also a tantalizing hint that the story itself has been told by the model, who went on to become a writer. A subtle, weighty movie that reminds me of Tolstoy’s novels: it moves slow, but by the end you realize every little piece has a purpose.

Posted by ecologist at 11:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The heavy book rests on my coffee table, half-read: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Abridged Edition (thank goodness!). It was some desire for intellectual completeness, for a sense of history, that enticed me to bring the tome home. Not Roman history, for I’m quite sure that there are better, more accurate modern histories, but rather the book itself as history. There is a certain set of old-school scholars (quite literally!) floating around Harvard Square who draw a part of their worldview from Gibbon’s prose, who interpret the current negative elements of American Society as a sign of moral corruption that inevitably arises from imperial power. It was to more fully understand this worldview that I picked up the work.

I was a bit surprised then, rather stupidly, to realize that the entire collapse of the Roman Republic into a despotic Empire merits nary a chapter. Living under a monarchy, Gibbon was quite naturally interested in why the Roman Empire varied from a quite well-run regime to the utter chaos of a Nero. And, to my untrained eye, Gibbon seems to draw a clear parallel to the English case: good rulers respect tradition and minimize flagrant uses of power. How exactly this pertains to the American Republic is thus quite unclear. Perhaps the dusty scholars of Harvard Square believe in the same way that to the extent respect for republican traditions restrains our chief executive, our Republic is strengthened.

I’ve also been quite shocked with the openness with which Gibbon mocks the Christian church. Today, as Richard Dawkins has learned, critiquing Christian superstition is the quickest route to being kicked out of the public debate. Something Gibbon said struck me as still true today, indeed perhaps behind the rise of fundamentalism that we see in most great religions today:

“The decline of ancient prejudice exposed a very numerous portion of humankind to the danger of a painful and comfortless situation. A state of skepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude, that if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision.”

Posted by ecologist at 03:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

James Kunstler’s new book, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st century, is bold, important, and flawed. His central premise is that the world does not have enough oil to meet demand in the next several decades. This fact, combined with other ecological and economic problems, means that a fairly radical change in how society functions will have to occur. I wholeheartedly agree with this central premise, and I think Kunstler has made a big contribution just by creating such an evocative title, which captures the essence of the monumental challenge of sustainable development. Still, the devil is in the details, and many of them seem problematic.

Kunstler falls into the same trap that other famous ecological writers such as Paul Ehrlich have fallen into: jumping from short-term trends to long-term scenarios too quickly. Generally, short-term predictions are pretty easy to make, as so many drivers can be treated as constants; there are dozens of studies conducted in the last several years, all of which point to demand for oil outstripping supply, and thus to predictably higher prices. From this solid base, Kunstler leaps into an airy discussion of a totally transformed society. As an imaginative exercise, this has merit, but many of the predictions that Kunstler presents as certain are far from it. He also lapses into an apocalyptic tone that will be repellent to those not already in the environmentalist camp. Kunstler may well be right in his pessimism, but it is perhaps dangerous: from Malthus to Ehrlich to the Club of Rome, our predictions of gloom have often been off.

Kunstler’s analysis is also fundamentally conservative, in that he believes that humanity will mostly deal with expensive oil by reverting to technologies common in the 19th century, like electric streetcars and more compact cities. While I agree that some of these technologies will be crucial, I think Kunstler vastly underestimates the degree of hysteresis in socioeconomic systems, in the sense Steve Carpenter uses the term. The future will not look much like the past, even if the suite of energy sources is similar, just because so much has changed. Beautiful historical case studies, such as Jared Diamond pursues in Collapse, can never be any more than loose analogies to our very unique present.

So, what then can we say about the middle ground, before the long emergency? Ecologists must being to study this no-man’s land, for it’s where the best policy-making takes place. For example, I’ve begun trying to study how patterns of urban growth in the developing world will commit those countries to different per capita oil use rates, with global implications. There’s also a lot of room for an enlightened government here, to conduct what in the Pentagon would be called a war game. Get in the same room an oil trader, a global change scientist, a utility company executive, a factory owner, and an urban planner, and ask how they would respond to different scenarios of oil scarcity. The collective impressions that emerge are likely to be far more accurate than the visions of any one man, no matter how wise.

Posted by ecologist at 11:33 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been struggling through John Rawls’ epic Political Liberalism, and while I can’t pretend to understand all its subtleties, I’ve been moved by the simplicity of its major point. He defines a comprehensive doctrine as a system that provides a set of ethics and morals, ranging from religious comprehensive doctrines (e.g., Catholic theology) to philosophical comprehensive doctrines (e.g., utilitarianism). His main theme is that “the diversity of reasonable comprehensive … doctrines found in modern democratic societies is not a mere historical condition that may soon pass away; it is a permanent feature of the public culture of democracy.” Such an obvious thought, but one that manages to redefine the scope of political philosophy!

Strangely, however, Rawls doesn’t really discuss international relations. Indeed, he goes to great lengths to say that his scheme cannot be applied to relationships between peoples. I’m skeptical, and part of me wonders if Rawls lost the courage to follow his ideas to their logical conclusion.

The question, to put it in Rawlsian lingo, is whether an overlapping consensus exists among different peoples (who often have radically different comprehensive doctrines) on basic political matters. I think something like this forming over the past half-century, slowly, embryonically, but forming. What else then is the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and the Geneva Conventions, if not expression of some shared political conception? How can so many people be espousing thoughts on “international human rights law,” if there isn’t something there? Granted, there is no international “law” in the strict sense, as there is no controlling legal authority (thank goodness, given the UN’s current structure). Still, what we see is the process of building a consensus. Ironically, the US government, which fought so hard to create the UN after the Second World War, now is frantically trying to stop this consensus from forming more fully, lest it reduce US hegemony somewhat.

Posted by ecologist at 09:02 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A story of mine was published online! To see it online at Badosa, click below:

http://www.badosa.com/bin/obra.pl?id=n239

Enjoy! In the next several days, I'll post an original column on the so-called "Death of Environmentalism"

Posted by ecologist at 08:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I picked up a copy of Don Quixote recently in, of all places, a chain book store in the airport. I was really surprised to find any classic work in a place dedicated to helping travelers just pass the time, so I asked the clerk about it. Apparently it?s one of their bestsellers.

Somehow I think that Don Quixote is selling well to the airplane hordes not just because it's a hell of an entertaining read, which it is, but that the work somehow strikes a chord in post-modern folk?s heart. I could take this in a trivial direction, and make jokes about President Bush tilting at windmills, but truthfully I mean something a little more deep than that. Moreover, I find such analogies offensive, mere liberal whistling in the graveyard, given the uplifting success of the Iraq election. I can't really enjoy lefty jokes when the core of the progressive lexicon is being appropriate, and there are no major Democrats standing up to reclaim concepts like liberty.

No, I really think that Cervantes speaks to our current experience for another, more profound reason. His era, before the Enlightenment but after the Renaissance, and smack in the middle of the Inquisition in Spain, is a little like ours. The dominant political order, the dominant worldview, seems corrupt and ineffective. Traditional concepts of morality seem at best not quite adequate to the new world that?s emerging. And yet the old order is in no way weaker, if anything it seems at the pinnacle of its power. In this context, Cervantes seems to me immeasurably brave. He not only sense this fundamental disconnect and satirizes it, he heartily laughs at the absurdity of it all. This from a man who spent several years of his life held captive for ransom. May I find the strength to have the same courage to laugh.

Posted by ecologist at 08:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)