The cosmopolitan ecologist

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The remnants of Hurricane Noel are blowing through Cambridge, shaking the last of the leaves from the trees. Right now the rain feels cold and hard, and I can’t wait until after the Hurricane comes through and the warm tropical air takes over.

I’m deeply sorry for not having written a blog post for so long. It’s not that I haven’t been writing; I’ve actually been editing several scientific manuscripts I’m quite excited about. The problem of course, is that most of my friends won’t ever read my scientific writing, so it’s like it sort of doesn’t exist outside academia. Also, science writing is by definition incremental and limited, so different from a well-crafted essay.

Speaking of hurricanes, it felt like one hit the city, with all the excitement over the Red Sox. I kind of found the excitement fun and sweet, and ended up arguing with some leftist intellectuals at Harvard who seem to feel that if a lot of people like something it must be suspect. I can’t say I’m a huge baseball fan, but I like how it unifies people. I watched part of the games from in front of Cardullo’s, a store in Harvard Square that leaves a TV on in their window. The sidewalk become a cool mix of homeless folks, local Bostonians, cops, and Harvard profs, all hanging out and watching the game. It is, in truth, one of the more socioeconomically integrated spaces in Cambridge, a town that is often anything but integrated.

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I returned from visiting my wife at Stanford, and as I stepped off the plane it was raining in East Boston. This made me indescribably happy. After several weeks in the unchanging, beautiful Palo Alto summer- always sunny and 80F- I was frankly bored. Granted, seeing the oleander in bloom, smelling the hibiscus (my only memory from my natal state, Hawaii), hearing the hummingbirds buzzing around my head, I was happy. And I got a lot of thinking done, as I walked down long streets designed for cars. But perhaps because I didn’t have any job to stress me out, the days slipped by one by one, pleasantly. Even the fruit in the farmer’s market was ridiculously ripe, bursting with flavor. It was paradise. It was monotonous. In a way, isn’t this the dream of suburbia, a life smooth and cool?

I found myself missing weather. On our weekend trips up to San Francisco, I loved the cold fog rolling into Sunset, positively sublime, if I can use that discredited word from the 19th century Romantics. I even loved the crazy bums in the streets, the craziest in the United States. At least their were little moments, like when a homeless man came in this restaurant and screamed for no reason, that no one controlled or could have predicted.

This line of thinking is, course, clearly bobo (bohemian bourgeois), for I’ve never lived in a truly bad neighborhood. Maybe one can only fear the suburb when one can afford to live there, and indeed know all the responsibilities of raising a family might push you that way. People want predictability, until they get it.

I chatted with a friend of a friend while sitting in a fantastic coffeeshop, Ritual. She makes her living designing spaces in Second Life. I always wonder whether these online virtual spaces will be more like Palo Alto- predictable and pleasant- or full of the electronic equivalent of the homeless man screaming. Online, people can choose between designing a paradise, or something just a bit more quirky and gritty and unstable. Who knows which will in the end predominate?

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Sixty years ago this June, General George Marshall stepped into Harvard Yard and delivered what may be the most famous commencement speech of all time, proposing what came to be called the Marshall Plan. On the anniversary of Marshall’s speech, I’ve been reflecting on what has changed since 1947. The developing countries are in the midst of a massive urbanization that makes the redevelopment of Europe after WWII look puny, and yet American leadership on the international stage is nowhere to be found, making John Edwards comments at the end of the last debate so important.

Marshall’s plan involved massive transfers of funds from America to the rebuilding countries in Western Europe, totaling some $170 billion in today’s dollars. Yet as Marshall made clear, it was a bargain, for by investing in Europe’s redevelopment America was insuring its own security. As he put it, it was only “logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” Marshall’s key insight was that aid, properly conceived, is not charity but an essential part of national security.

After WWII, the clear link between Europe and the U.S. was direct military conflict. Marshall essentially argued that if America did not aid Europe it would have to deal eventually with another world war started in that region. Today the link is not a direct threat of interstate violence, but the growing web of transboundary issues. The increasingly globalized nature of the world economy and environment make what happens over there, in the developing world, central to what happens here in America.

And there is a lot happening over there. This year, for the first time in the history of Homo sapiens, a majority of our species live in cities. This process of urbanization will continue, driven by the greater number of deaths than births among urban dwellers, as well as rural-to-urban migration. By 2030 the United Nations Population Division estimates there will be 1.75 billion new urban residents, the equivalent of building a city the size of Vancouver every single week. More new dwellings will be built in the next 25 years than currently exist in all of Europe. If you were to push all this new urban area together, a good guess is that it will cover an area the size of California.

I spend most of my professional time thinking about one potent link between urbanization in the developing world and America’s well-being, the environment. The billions of new urban dwellers will increasingly demand more and more oil to drive their cars, as they begin to approach American standards of living. How much oil they end up using depends on the form of the coming urbanization, and whether safe and efficient mass transit is available. That in turn will affect whether over the long-term, the number of potential consumers of oil will grow faster than oil supply, resulting in much higher prices at the pump.

Additionally, there is now broad consensus in the scientific literature of the serious potential effects of global warming. Some of these effects, such as the flooding of low-lying areas and climate-change induced famines, may create large movements of refugees. One recent study by the British NGO Christian Aid predicts 250 million refugees will flee global warming’s effects, a figure several times larger than the number of displaced people during all of WWII. Just how bad global warming will be depends, in no small part, on how the poorer countries of the world grow and urbanize.

Yet American leadership during this crucial period in history is mostly absent, or at least distracted by other issues. We have engaged in a war of choice in Iraq that in one year costs us almost as much as the entire Marshall Plan. At the same time, we remain stingy with our foreign aid, giving only 17 cents in aid for every $100 our economy produces. How far we have come since Marshall’s vision of enlightened investment in a better world! If America continues to shirk its responsibilities, we will be abdicating a leadership role in the globalized world of the 21st century, to our own detriment.

And that’s why I found John Edwards comments at the end of his last debate so heartening. When asked what he highest priority would be when he got into office, he said it would be to “re-establish America's moral authority in the world”, saying that in comparison other issues “become less important and subservient.” It was a subtle answer, and perhaps one not well suited to the quick sound bite. However, it reflects exactly the kind of positive reengagement with the world that American needs.

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I managed, quite by accident, to read two books recently that covered the same theme in different ways. Both discussed the sphere of public debate in the United States, and its relative decline in recent decades as media sources have become more celebrity-driven. One leaves you feeling righteous, but with no practical outlet for that emotion. The other is eminently practical and useful for a politician, but leaves me feeling a little queasy.

I picked up Al Gore’s Assault on Reason at the Harvard Coop. I’ll confess to not having bought it, but instead spent a pleasant hour sitting in a chair in a bookstore, reading most of the text. Gore argues that reasoned discourse in American democracy has all but disappeared, replaced by entertainment of the basest kind. This has led, moreover, to a loss of faith in reason itself, in democratic decisions made by an informed electorate. I believe in the righteousness of Gore’s call, and its something I’ve felt myself for a long time. But I don’t believe that a hortatory call to return to reason will do much good, just as it generally has not done the environmental movement much good.

I actually listened to Mark Halperin and John Harris’s book The Way to Win during a long drive down to Millbrook, NY. The central point of the book is that the modern media freak show exists, and politicians better learn how to tame it, or at least live with it. They outline two basic paths a politicians can take: the Clinton path (play to the center) or the Rove path (play to the base). I loved the book in a Machiavellian way (although the pro-Hillary bias was strong enough that I sometimes wondered if Halpern was also moonlighting for her campaign), but what scared me was the implication that what matters in the public debate is the sincerity and vehemence of a politician’s ideas, rather than a reasoned examination of politician’s ideas.

I want to believe in another route, some path for our society that lies between these two books. It would have to be more than an elegy for our (slightly more) reasoned past. It would have to be more than a moral call to return to the values of the Enlightenment. It must somehow be consistent with the brave new media world we live in. Sadly, I don’t know what the other route is. Even Mr.Gore’s admirable book just barely beings to point the way toward a Modernism for the 21st century.

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Last Thursday, Bright Eyes played at the old Metropolitan Theatre, the insanely ornate and baroque opera hall in Boston. It was thoroughly surreal, starting with the beautiful set by Gillian Welch. What followed after couldn’t have been more of a contrast. The Bright Eyes band entered wearing white suits, white cowboy hats, and white boots, while various psychedelic visuals played on a screen behind them. The bad was followed by several cellist, a flutist, and two drummers. They then briskly played through some extremely loud, complex, and angry arrangements of their songs, each more bizarre than the next. It was a failure musically, in that most of the songs sounded horrible, but it was perhaps the most interesting failure I’ve ever seen on stage. Conor Oberst has adopted a new narrative onstage, trying to look like some cinema version of the Doors playing The End to rioting crowds.

In a way, it’s a shame Conor felt the need to play the bacchanalian rock-star. He could probably sound a whole lot better if he was comfortable with a different narrative. He’s a damn good songwriter and poet, and should just be comfortable (like Gillian) in that role. I guess, however, people tend to adopt the narrative we expect from them. Rock has a way of making its stars implode in colorful supernovas, for the audience’s amusement.

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It’s finally spring here in Cambridge, in a chilly New England kind of way. There’s a nor’easter blowing through now, bringing a cold, hard rain, making the future marathoners miserable in anticipation of tomorrow. The real sign of the coming season was the delicate pink blossoms of the ornamental magnolia on my street. They are a grateful reminder that I’ve survived another winter, and a chance to muse on all that has passed since the last time these flowers bloomed.

Through the whole last year, the Iraq War continued. The build up to the war and its aftermath have now gone on longer than the entire process of falling in love, getting engaged, getting married, and celebrating my second wedding anniversary. Food for thought, that is. The war doesn’t seem likely to end until after January 2009, when a new president is sworn in.

I’ve been reading recently Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and it seems to have special relevance now. All historical analogies are inexact and dangerous, but I think the American body politic could learn something from the ancient Athenians. If the theatrical speeches of Thucydides are to be believed, at least Athenian politicians would talk openly of the paradox between their internal democracy, at the time one of the most open in the world, and their empire. One quote in particular stood out, describing how the wars in defense of their empire subverted democratic discourse:

“To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action.”

These meditations have left me in a melancholy mood. The magnolia tree, it now appears, will have to bloom twice more before our troops are withdrawn from Iraq. And then, if history is any guide, there will be another war somewhere else rather soon.

I hold out hope though that someday a set of institutions will make outright was between nations as unthinkable as an attack between Maryland and Virginia within the United States, or indeed as an attack between France and Germany within the European Union. This dream was the subject of a sparsely attend seminar this week at the Sheraton Commander hotel, entitled “Democracy and the Future.” George Soros gave a rambling keynote address, which was nicely summarized in Amartya Sen’s response. If democracy is participation in power, in the discussion within a society of what should be and shall be, then while Athens was democratic internally it ended significant democracy for many of the citizens of other states. The same is of course true, although Dr. Sen was too polite to mention it, for the United States today: unless we strive for something greater, history will also remember us for our grand democratic experiment at home and our profound failure of imagination abroad.

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On Friday, I got the chance to see the Prime Minister of France, Dominique de Villepin, give a speech in the Forum at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Outside, the snow was coming down in white swirls, making the streets slushy in Cambridge and slowing the traffic down to walking speed. Nevertheless, he entered into the building on time, wearing the standard politician uniform of a black business suit with tie. After a somewhat fulsome introduction by a Harvard professor, he took the podium and gave a decent speech.

I was there, primarily, because I remember with fondness M. de Villepin’s speech at United Nations, opposing the US-led invasion of Iraq. He revisited the Iraq issue during his Harvard speech, making the general point that no country, even the United States, is powerful enough to be a global hegemon by itself. Therefore, international institutions must be strengthened.

I agree with this thesis, and it was generally well received at the Kennedy School, which is always internationalist in its character due to its diverse make-up. However, the specific programs he proposed seemed rather uninspiring: expansion of the UN Security Council to include Germany, Japan, and a representative of Africa; an international conference to solve the Iraq problem; another international conference to solve the Palestinian problem; and increased foreign development aid. No real news was made during the speech.

Most interesting was what lines drew applause. The fiscally-conservative elements in the crowd gave him applause for his promise to continue slowly modernizing and opening France’s economy. The libertarian elements (in the original sense of that term) clapped loudly when he said no country should torture its prisoners. Disturbingly, there was almost no overlap between these two groups, leading me to wonder what ever happened to the traditional conservative position of support for free trade and respect for the rule of law

To his credit, M. de Villepin was brave enough to take 30 minutes of unscripted questions from the audience. This is more than can be said for several American politicians, including our current President. In fact, M. de Villepin was noticeably more relaxed during this question period than during his speech. He displayed the great rhetorical skill of subtly changing a question to one he wanted to answer, and then responding to the latter. At times this meant he skipped the substance of a question, as when he dodged a question about poverty among North African immigrants by discussing unemployment in France among the general population. Still, I’m willing to forgive this rhetorical evasion, for one in such a political position as he must avoid making news accidentally.

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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.

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There’s been much grumbling among the anti-war protestors who attended the January 27^th march that the press got the numbers wrong. The Associated Press report stated “tens of thousands,” apparently because an unnamed police source suggested he thought (without having done any sort of systematic estimate) there were less than 100,000 people. United for Peace and Justice didn’t help things by claiming to have 500,000, which (having been there) was simply not credible.

As I scientist, this deeply frustrates me. This is an easy problem to solve. UFPJ needs to negotiate for a digital camera to be placed at a high location with a view of the rally site (the Washington Monument would have been perfect in this case). The camera would take a photo every 30 minutes or so, and the picture would be uploaded to the Internet. From there, someone (and I’d be happy to help) would download the picture, geometrically rectify it (this accounts for the slant of the picture, the fact that it’s not straight up and down), and then make an estimate of the crowd size (one typically counts the density of the crowd in two or three specific 100 m2 sections of the photo, then multiplies by the area of the crowd). The estimate, as well as the picture (archival and geometrically rectified) it’s based on, could then be placed on a website, in near real time. Journalists would be likely to report the estimate, as long as it was clear that the group doing the estimate was not directly affiliated with the march, and as long as they could double-check the calculation with the photos. The whole thing could probably be done for a couple thousand dollars worth of fees, rental equipment, etc., and would provide credible estimates to the press.

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I sit on the edge of the tidal basin. There is not a hint of ice on the water, and its surface is so smooth it mirrors the low-lying jets passing overhead. Other than their rumble all is quiet, save for the honks of geese and the occasional chatter of a nearby game of touch football. On moments when the wind blows right, I can smell the stables of the Park Service, a refreshing odor after the cleanness of the rest of the district. Across the water tourists swarm up the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, and many of them with anti-war placards are turned away, for of course one can’t protest without the proper authorization.

It is colder on the white marble of Jefferson’s memorial. Here, thin shards of ice swirl in the water. On rare moments a shorebird tries to stand on one of these icebergs, only to quickly topple off. On my walk here I was struck by how brutal the new WWII memorial looks, naked granite, filling part of the National Mall. If humanity has a 21st century as bloody as the one we just left, perhaps the Mall will be filled with war memorials, and they will have to cut down the cherry trees to make space. As Jefferson said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

I’m on the fringes now of the rally. The protestors haven’t yet filled up their designated area, even though it’s already 11pm. This doesn’t bode well for a massive turnout, but there are perhaps 50,000 people here, with more arriving every second. What fascinates me is the intricate ecology of these marches. The socialist and communist papers are hawked aggressively near the entrance- they are the bottom feeders of the march, the carrion eaters. Everywhere, college kids swarming, playing football, filling up the kid’s merry-go-round. Near the front is the stage, full of speakers and media types, who are mostly ignored by everybody. The exception is some of the preacher-types, like Jesse Jackson, that can still spur the crowd. Even Jesse’s speech was a little bizarre, coinciding as it did with a nearby tribal drumming rendition of “Give Peace a Chance,” complete with a sax being played in a decidedly Dixieland style. Bizarreness is the order of the day. There was a man pushing a grocery cart around selling cold pretzels. There were a group of folks with a sign that said “Arms are for hugging,” and they thus went around hugging people. Numerous cute babies walked around in activist costumes. A man wore a classic Minuteman colonial costume, except for 1980’s vintage running shoes.

I’m now happily sitting in Teaism in Penn Quarter, digesting my meal. The place has been taken over by activists, and has a hip bohemian vibe because of it. The march after the rally was exhausting, a slow-motion slog around the Capitol. It was pleasing to see us all stretched out, surrounding the building. Interestingly, the staffers in many of the Senate office buildings had put anti-war placards up in the windows, and a few staffers even greeted the crowd on behalf of their senator!

It’s nighttime now, and I’m looking out a plate glass window onto Connecticut Avenue. I marveled as I walked here how many contradictions float around the city. It is modern and clean, but there’s a homeless person over practically every street vent. One can sense the power that resides in the city when a black town car drives by, the man in the back wearing a tuxedo. And yet the city seems shockingly unsure of itself. To Americans, the land inside the Beltway has ceased to be a place where good happens, at least consistently (I still hold out hope), and instead is just a place of necessary secrets. You see this in some of the government servants who jog by on the Mall- they are proud of themselves for being in DC in a position of power, rather than for the good things they did with their power.

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I will be in Washington on January 27, for United for Peace and Justice’s legal, permitted demonstration against the escalation of the war in Iraq. The time seems ripe now, and an effective protest may make a huge difference. The new Democratic Congress has to listen to the anti-war movement, at least to some extent, for we are part of their constituency. Moreover, the growing consensus opinion that the troop escalation is wrong (70% in a recent AP poll) adds political clout to the protest. I am also happy, frankly, that UFPJ has decided not to work with ANSWER, a more militant coalition. This will make the message of the march more focused and clear.

Who knows if the march will really be effective, or change any Congressman’s mind about how to vote? My opinion is that every person should have a set of bedrock moral beliefs that are not cast aside when they are inefficient. One should, or course, try to make one’s actions in support of these beliefs as politically effective as possible. A decent argument could be made that protest events are less effective as a political tool in the US than they once were. But history is mysterious, and sometimes one has to act without knowing the full consequences of one’s action. Vaclav Havel writes eloquently about this with regards to the Charter 77. At the time it was a mostly symbolic manifesto calling for more civil freedoms within the Czech communist system. In the end, the Charter ended up starting a chain of events that profoundly changed the Czech system, but no one knew in advance it would turn out that way. At some point a man has to commit to concrete actions that are consistent with his beliefs and improve the world a bit, and leave the writing of future history to the historians.

There is a poisonous, hip irony out there on the web that is deeply cynical about the UFPJ march. Wonkette gives probably the most egregious example, when she says “It won’t make a bit of difference, but you might get lucky with a hippie!” While I’m sure there will be a few members of the hippie species at the march, the vast majority of folks will be quite normal middle-class liberals. Wonkette’s comments reveal a deep smugness. The entire blogosphere seems to me a bit like the salons of aristocrats in Paris in the 19^th century, supportive of the Enlightenment but fearful of the rabble.

There’s also a darker insinuation in Wonkette’s remarks, that this march is just protest for protest’s sake. Milan Kundera summarized this as kitsch:

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

Bloggers hate this second tear, and well they should- the most important function of the blogosphere is as a BS detector. However, our hip, poisonous irony has also banished the first tear. I reject that. In a democracy, I want people to react emotionally (but legally) when their government invades a foreign country, displacing hundreds of thousands and killing an almost equal number. I want people to shed that first tear. And if that makes me un-ironic and subject to Wonkette’s well-crafted satire, then so be it.

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This short piece is in response to NPR's conversation on Morning Edition on 12/11/2006, where some of the diplomatic fury at the UN over the Iraq war was blamed on Kofi Annan's strong-willed nature. You can find the piece at:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6607693 

Thank you for the excellent conversation (12/11/06) between James Traub and Steve Inskeep about Kofi Annan’s tenure at the United Nations. It provided a detailed look into the geopolitics of the UN that is sadly often lacking in the news media. However, your focus on the strong-willed personality of Mr. Annan may have given your listeners the mistaken impression that it was his pure stubbornness that caused his second term, in the run-up to the Iraq war, to be so difficult. The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was a clear violation of the UN Charter, and in that situation any Secretary-General, even one as polite as Ban Ki-Moon, will protest mightily.

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Today, in the spirit of summer and the World Cup, I thought I'd write about something that has nothing to do with ecology and sustainable development, my usual topics. I've been catching the occassional football match, and got into a debate with a friend about whether or not World Cup games were lower scoring than they were in previous years. I'm sure someone else has looked at this, but I thought it'd be fun to check out the facts myself.

So, there's a big difference between the first several decades of the World Cup and the modern World Cup. The average number of total goals scored (by either team) has declined:

1930 4.0
1934 4.1
1938 4.7
1950 4.0
1954 5.4
1958 3.6
1962 2.8
1966 2.8
1970 3.0
1974 2.6
1978 2.7
1982 2.9
1986 2.5
1990 2.2
1994 2.7
1998 2.7
2002 2.6

 The same trend is evident if one looks at the average difference in scores between teams, which was higher before 1954 and lower afterward (anyone know why this is?):

1930 2.6
1934 1.5
1938 2.1
1950 2.3
1954 3.0
1958 1.5
1962 1.5
1966 1.5
1970 1.5
1974 1.7
1978 1.5
1982 1.4
1986 1.4
1990 1.2
1994 1.2
1998 1.3
2002 1.4

While the average number of total goals scored doesn't change much since 1958, there does seem to be a trend in the distribution over time. Interestingly, the number of null-null matches has decreased over time, as has the number of mathces with 5 or more total goals scored.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE GRAPH

A similar change in distribution occurs for the average difference in match scores. The number of tie games increases over time, as do the number of matches decided by one match. In contrast, the number of matches decided by 2 or more goals sharply declines over time.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE GRAPH

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gives a nice presentation of all the unusual events that happened on Election Day 2004. His discussion of all the efforts undertaken to suppress the Democratic turnout in Ohio (misallocation of voting machines, making voter registration difficult, disqualification of provisional ballots, etc.) is well-written, and certainly makes the case for unethical (and possibly illegal) behavior on the part of Kenneth Blackwell. However, I wanted to clarify one issue for people. Kennedy writes at length about the difference between the exit polls (which showed Kerry winning) and the vote tally (which Bush won), and he repeatedly says things like “The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion”.

This is the probability of what statisticians call the null hypothesis. In this case, it is that “any difference in the proportion of votes for a candidate in the exit poll and the proportion of votes for a candidate in the precinct tally is due solely to the random nature of sampling voters as they exited the polls.” This hypothesis is vanishingly small, as has been known for more than a year, so it can be safely rejected. But this probability says NOTHING about the truth/validity of either of the following two alternative hypotheses being true:

1. The exit polls are biased, and did not accurately measure what voters did in the ballot box.

AND/OR

2. The votes cast in the ballot box were manipulated to give Bush a victory.

These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, and it’s possible that in a few precincts there was vote fraud, while the exit polls were systematically wrong in many states due to bias in the methodology. What does not seem plausible to me, given the decentralized nature of the American voting system, is the implication that only hypothesis 2 is correct- there’s just no way that vote fraud could be conducted in dozens of states, involving hundreds of people, and have it remain quiet. Pollsters may not have figured out the source of the bias, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In any event, showing people huge numbers like “one in 3 billion” only serves to rhetorically confuse people into thinking that’s the odds of vote fraud having occurred. If I’d reviewed this paper for a scientific journal I would’ve edited all such sentences out, as they aren’t germane to the main rhetorical thrust of the piece.

Posted by ecologist at 04:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There’s been much flack recently from the press about John McCain’s chilly reception at the New School in Manhattan. Howard Kurtz compiles this assault, and generally supports it. It’s a common critique, one that was trotted out in the press here in Boston when Dr. Rice gave an address at Boston College: incivilities by students and faculty toward the speaker are an attack on free speech. While I can see a grain of truth in this argument, I’ve come to believe it’s fundamentally wrong.

Everyone’s stated ideal is for open, vigorous two-way dialogue on the campuses of academia. I happen to believe that this can happen even for politicians. I once saw Representative David Price bravely defend his stance on the Iraq War in front of an audience at UNC, who got to ask questions of him for an hour and a half. All too often, however, an open debate is the last thing on a politician’s mind. The goal is a clean, crisp photo-op, with an impressive backdrop that allows the politician to borrow from the prestige of the university. Questions are rarely allowed, and if they are they are prescreened to be safe and polite to the speaker. There should certainly be no boos or catcalls or signs that might distract from the preordained message of the event. It’s important to recognize that this photo-op bears no resemblance to an open, two-way dialogue. Its purpose is in fact the exact opposite.

There’s something a bit thin-skinned about the American dislike of heckling. It’s in sharp contrast with the British system that allows for more open hostility during public discussion. Tony Blair faces more heckling in one of his weekly sessions in front of Parliament than Bush has faced in his entire presidency. I sometimes fanaticize about watching Bush wither in front of weekly pointed questions from Congress…

Something deeper is going on that causes these incivilities than mere impoliteness. They are a calculated way to puncture the media bubble that increasingly surrounds every single event of every politician. If a student body deeply resents being used as a backdrop for a photo-op, then why in the world shouldn’t they make that know by moderate incivilities? After all, McCain will still have plenty of chances to exercise his free speech rights- what’s wrong with the students squeezing in a bit of their message while they fleetingly have a chance. As a media strategy, this detournement works: we can be quite sure that Mr. Kurtz wouldn’t have discussed how the students felt about McCain’s speech if they hadn’t acted out. In a way, by being so deferential to authority the media has created the need for incivility, to puncture the media bubble.

There’s also a historical irony here, for many of those who critiqued the actions of the New School were, I suspect, supporters of moderate incivilities toward those who perpetuated the Vietnam War. I would bet, although I’m not certain, that Mr. Kurtz is in this category. I’m sure incivility to the establishment is more threatening when you’re part of it. Interestingly, Mr. Kurtz didn’t raise free speech issues when people heckled the leaders of China, or those who opposed Israeli policy in the occupied territories. The clear message to the universities is: be a useful backdrop, and stop asserting  your opinions so much.

Posted by ecologist at 10:34 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

News broke this week of the National Security Agency’s seizure of essentially every Americans’ calling history that they could get their hands on. I feel shocked and saddened, but not particularly surprised, given the track records of the principles involved. Interestingly, the press coverage has focused on the scope of the program (some have defended that they aren’t listening to the content of the conversations) or its effectiveness (statistically, a database of all Americans’ phone call seems likely to generate so many false positives as to be useless for law enforcement). To me, this focus seems to miss the point. The Administration has clearly intentionally violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the FISA law. It has clearly intentionally violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the 4th Amendment. What is dangerous about the Bush Administration then is not this or that action and whether it is effective, but their direct assault on the principle of constitutionalism. I mean this in the broad sense, where constitutionalism is simply the limitation of government by a set of publicly-defined, transparent laws. The reason every English-speaking schoolchild studies the Magna Carta is that it was one of the first documents of constitutionalism; the actual specifics of the rules in the Magna Carta are quite unimportant to modern men.

Whatever your political party, you have to admit that constitutionalism is central to what made the United States the great democracy that it is: we are a country of laws, not of men. What does it mean then, that some of our men of letters argue that it doesn’t matter that the president knowingly and willingly violated the law, because it was effective? When any columnist or reporter makes this argument, they are becoming, in the terminology of Milan Kundera, “the ally of their own gravediggers.” If there is no constitutionalism, if there are no rules within which democracy functions, then there are no political writers, only polemicists. Honest political writing is an effort to influence public opinion so as to democratically shape policy. If there no laws for the powerful, then writers become little more than Mark Anthony to a Caesar: skilled orators, perhaps, but not free men.

Posted by ecologist at 08:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There has been much buzz in the media this past week about the relatively sharp spike in oil prices. I’ve been frustrated by how the majority of coverage has focused on the (very real) possibility of oil company manipulation, as if we’re searching for a convenient villain in the process. The Bush Administration’s policy response to the price spike has been storyline #2, even though truthfully there’s little a president can do to affect oil prices over the short-term. Sadly, there’s been little coverage of how U.S. oil prices compare to the other G7 counties (they are much lower), except for a brief fact check I saw on CNN International (and even that focused on other countries’ high taxes, without explaining the good policy reasons for them). Even worse, there’s been no coverage of the likely long-term trend in oil prices over the next decade or two. Global supply will remain relatively constant, or at best slightly increase; this is not because of technological limitations like a lack of refinery capacity, but simply because there’s a finite supply of the stuff and what’s left is harder to extract. Global demand, on the other hand, will continue to grow rapidly, as nations like China and India industrialize.

The clear implication is that oil prices will continue to rise over the long-term. In this context, the current U.S. government policy of seeking to maintain steady, low prices seems quixotic. It would be far more honest if the U.S. committed itself to expecting steady 5% annual increases in oil prices. The U.S. economy could absorb that sort of gradual annual increase in prices, as we all slowly adapted, whereas a rapid huge price spike could be very damaging.

Yet the press mentions none of these weighty issues. This seems to be a general problem: the media focus on particulars, not on the underlying trend. Global warming is another great example. There is much discussion of whether this or that hurricane was caused by global warming, an attribution that’s almost scientifically impossible to make. In contrast, the long-term, gradual trends (e.g., glacial melt and sea level rise) that keeps us scientists literally up at night, get little press (Andy Revkin being a notable exception).

Maybe this is just human psychology. We focus on what is nearby in space and time, and forget what is distant. It may also be the failure of environmental scientists like myself to find a good, compelling narrative. It’s just challenging with such a grand process: we’re recreating Noah’s flood by burning fossilized sunlight! Perhaps the best summary was what was once said by Herbert Stein, a conservative economist who served under Nixon and Ford: “What can’t go on forever, won’t.”

Posted by ecologist at 07:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There’s an odd thing about being around Harvard, particularly places like the Kennedy School of Government: All sorts of rather well known and experienced people are constantly hanging around. There are half a dozen lecturers around campus who are just passing time, now that their jobs in the Clinton Administration have ended. They teach occasionally, but seem to spend more time writing pithy books. A parade of seminar speakers like James Carville comes through, earning their speaking fee. In a sense, even our university president, Larry Summers, is a Clinton-era exile now just biding his time.

This palpable sense of exile expresses itself differently in different people. For some, it’s just a temporary state, which will end with a new De