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)

I recently got to spend almost a week in Washington, DC. I’ve been thinking ever since about what Washington symbolizes, both to those who work there and to the rest of America.

To the rest of America, Washington has become synonymous with corruption in government. For a politician, to have spent too long “inside the Beltway” is a political liability, a sign of being out of touch with reality. Yet the architecture of DC still plays this symbolic role, reporters always standing in front of the Capitol while talking generally about American democracy. Americans love what these monuments to the Constitution symbolize, they are just deeply distressed about how low the art of governing has descended in recent decades.

To those who I’ve talked to who actually live in DC, the experience is considerably more multifaceted. First of all, there is the mass of citizens who have little to do with how the Federal Government operates. They watch the shenanigans of the government on TV with the rest of us, feeling vaguely embarrassed. For those in the government, at least the majority who are career civil servants (not to mention those idealistic folks in different NGOs), they feel rather hurt by the low public opinion of Washington. The work done by these civil servants is mostly non-political, the dull but extremely important task of administering a large country. Waves of political appointees come and go (most of them never really seeing Washington as anything other than a symbol), but beneath them the civil servants continue. This is both a very positive thing (a government needs continuity) and a sometime negative thing (the ship of state turns very slowly indeed).

I thought about all this as I wandered about the Mall and L’Enfants Washington. For me, it was personal, for I am seriously thinking about leaving Harvard’s ivory towers and going to work in DC at an environmental NGO. I feel at peace with this decision professionally, for it’s where I think I can do the most good for the environment. Yet it is indeed a weird time to move to DC, morally. The government, particularly the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower’s phrase, not mine), is arguably more powerful and more corrupt than ever before. I wonder sometimes what Cicero felt working in Rome (before his exile, at least). I suspect he felt similar to how all those career civil servants feel today: proud of their own work, still optimistic about their country’s potential, yet vaguely worried that more powerful tides are slowly pulling the ship of state toward dangerous shoals.

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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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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)

There is a malaise among United States environmentalists. We remain proud of our past victories, and certainly hope to maintain these victories into the future. The Clean Air Act has dramatically reduced SO2 air pollution in the US, substantially decreasing respiratory problems and toxic smog. The elimination of lead from gasoline has saved thousands of children from mental impairment. Even today, environmentalists make progress on some issues: the amount of wild land protected from development steadily increases every year. Still, there’s a deep sense of fear about the future, a sense of powerlessness, like the environmental movement is being derailed by something far more powerful and fundamental than mere anti-environmentalism.

Within the US, the rise of the neo-conservatives to power in the Republican Party means that little progress has been made on any environmental issue since 1994. There seems to be a prevailing belief not that limited and well-run government is wise, but that all governmental action is inevitably flawed. As Grover Norquist put it, the goal is to get government small enough to “drown it in the bathtub.” The obvious corollary is that any government action to protect or conserve the environment. In the limit, this argument could be used to get rid of almost any law: land-use regulation, the Endangered Species Act, the prohibition against illegal dumping of toxic waste, whatever. What’s new here is the existence of an anti-government tendency in the Republican Party- that’s been around for decades- but the shift from a focus on efficient, limited government to a hatred of all government. And so, we environmentalists find out movement in the US derailed, for reasons that have very little to do with the environment itself and much to with the Republican Party’s masterful political strategy over the past few decades.

The most significant environmental problems are now global, not national: Global warming, biodiversity loss, sustainable development, and urbanization are all challenges of the highest order to civilization, and must be dealt with by the international system. And yet US environmentalists find ourselves impotent on this stage as well. The neo-conservative vision seems to be that America’s military and economic power must never be limited by anything, anytime. The clear corollary for the environment is that no environmental treaty should constrain US activities, ever. This is why we can’t sign the Convention on Biological Diversity, or the Kyoto Protocol, or anything else- to sign would be to admit that there was something worthwhile about international governance. Again, there has always been a streak of isolationism in the Republican Party, but in its new form the idea is taken much further: the US is a new empire, and should act like one. And so again, we environmentalists fin the US simply absent from all the international environmental activity, for reasons that have little to do with the CBD or any other treaty, and a lot to do with the invasion of Iraq and the US opposition to the International Criminal Court. What, then, is an environmental scientist like myself to do? All the issues on which I could provide useful scientific input are non-issues, taken off the table, and in truth I feel increasingly useless. I can keep doing my science, but it doesn’t matter one damn bit as long as these larger political tenets of neo-conservatism stay unchallenged.

Posted by ecologist at 09:24 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This list goes out to all my friends and colleagues in Europe. I may share many progressive viewpoints with them, but I get occasionally frustrated by how they talk about the United States and its politics. The scope of the problem became more apparent after the chilly reception that Bernard Henri-Levy’s new book received in the United State, even among folks who are its natural ideological allies (see Garrison Keiler’s excellent review of the book for more). Here then are 10 facts European progressives should keep in mind when writing if they want Americans to be at all receptive to their argument:

1. America is a big country, which if overlaid on Europe would stretch from Lisbon to Baghdad. I say this not to be chauvinistic (although there are plenty of Americans who would be), but just to point out that there’s an enormous amount of terrain for a visitor like Mr. Henry-Levi to cover, ranging from swampy lowlands to vast deserts to tall sierras.
2. America is very diverse ethnically, with arguably more ethnic variation than Europe. Certainly, the percentage of Americans who are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants (10.4%) is far higher here than in the EU. These waves of immigrants have come in complex, spatially heterogeneous patterns, creating odd political outliers like the vehemently anti-Castro Cubans of Miami.
3. While perhaps not as culturally differentiated as Europe, where one switches languages every couple hundred miles, there is significant cultural variation in the US. The Southeastern States, with their legacy of slavery, are very different in culture and norms than the industrial Northeast. In the Western US it gets even more complicated: you have Nevada, where prostitution and gambling and just about everything else is legal, right next to conservative Mormon Utah! Most importantly, the United States has a pronounced cultural split between its urban and rural cultures. In many senses, these two groups are now fighting for power.
4. It is rather pointless to talk about “American culture” or “American politics” as a single unitary entity, any more than one can talk about a “European culture” without sounding a bit naïve to a European about the complexity and diversity of that continent.
5. There are of course some unifying traits for Americans, but they are rather few and far between, truthfully. Moreover, they tend to be of an almost philosophic nature, concerning our general temperament, rather than specific things like baseball or peanut butter (both of which substantial minorities of Americans hate). Alexis de Tocqueville does as good a job as anybody in sketching these things out, and I personally feel like no one’s really improved on his work.
6. Even the few unifying traits that exist have significant subpopulations in the US that counteract the general rule. Like all generalizations I as an American could make about Europeans, they would become harmful if they’re used to prejudge.
7. Politics in America is not some simple function of a unitary “American” character. In fact the federal system of state autonomy makes each state its own political world, to a degree many foreigners from countries with centralized governments often don’t understand.
8. Political parties in the US serve as broad coalitions, rather than as the strident unified political parties one sees in parliamentary systems. For constitutional and historical reasons (that I often bemoan) Americans are stuck with this system, which transfers all the public compromises among parties in a parliamentary system when they form a governing coalition into the back room, behind the scenes. Therefore, statements about the view of “the Republicans” strike most Americans as facile- it’s not even really worth talking politics about them until you recognize at least their 3 or 4 major constituents.
9. The current religious right-wing ascendancy at the Federal level really the political victory of a relatively small percentage of people who have control of one of our two parties, and so far haven’t shattered the rest of the party’s coalition. It doesn’t reflect anything near the majority of its own party.
10. All the electoral rules at a Federal level in the US have a consistent and intentional bias toward rural areas and away from urban areas, and toward “battleground states” (where neither party is dominant) and away from certain states (like California). This tends to make the Federal government in the US lag substantially behind urban areas in adopting progressive, cosmopolitan ideas. Don’t read too much into American culture by the politics in Washington.

Posted by ecologist at 09:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There’s been much discussion recently about the U.S. “bringing democracy” to Iraq. I got curious about the track-record of U.S. military interventions (my list below is taken from Wikipedia). Being a scientist, I looked for some quantitative data on the level of democracy in each country. This is an obviously difficult thing to quantify, but the data from Freedom House are useful and reasonably objective and reproducible. They use a 7-point scale for two different metrics, political rights (PR) and civil liberties (CL), with 1 representing the highest and 7 the lowest level of freedom. So, for the record, here are the U.S. interventions since 1972 (when the Freedom House data start), the rankings before the intervention, the change in rankings immediately after the intervention (positive numbers = more freedom), and the change in rankings 5-years after the intervention.

 

 

The net change is barely positive, with on average no-change in the PR score and a 1 point move toward more constitutional liberties. 5-years after the interventions, on average the countries have also moved 1 point toward more political rights. The next thing that should jump out at you is how variable the list is. Chile stands out as the single worst U.S. intervention, as the U.S. sponsored coup substantially reduced democracy. Grenada and Panama stand out as countries that significantly increased democracy after a U.S. intervention. Now, of course, this kind of crude analysis cannot replace a detailed analysis by historians of what actually occurred in each of these countries after the intervention, but I think the data capture the broad patterns of change very well.

To put this all in perspective, below are the average scores by region over the last two decades. There’s a general trend toward more democracy worldwide, with the exception of the Middle East and North Africa. Most of the changes are small (a point or two shift), but given that they involve hundreds of countries, they make the effect of U.S. interventions on democracy seem very minor indeed.

Posted by ecologist at 09:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It’s winter already in Boston, and today as I walked along Newbury Street the first snowflakes of the year fell onto the still-warm ground. There was something beautiful, but so sad, about it: the Hub shutting down psychologically for winter. I continued my wandering eastward, and somewhere around the Public Garden I first heard it, a faint booming of a megaphone. Once I got the Common, I recognized was it was, a crowd of a thousand or so people protesting the Iraq War. As someone who thinks the invasion of Iraq was misguided, and that the Bush Administration’s management of the occupation was ruinous, I was happy to join in. If anything, I felt kind of sheepish that I hadn’t heard about the rally in advance.

Still, as I sat there and listened to a parade of speakers, I felt depressed. For one thing, the speakers were of a decidedly anti-capitalist bent, and as I have come to believe in capitalism (with limits) as the best way to structure most economic sectors, I felt out of place. I also felt frustrated, as I knew that a few such comments could potentially tar the whole event as a “Communist” demonstration in the mainstream media.

There was another, deeper issue. At one point I felt a sense of solidarity with the gruffy activists, with their piercings and dyed hair and beards. But now I feel some frustration with these somewhat aimless lefty protests, for they often seem directed not at winning any particular political goal, but with demonstrating the purity of their convictions. And so I want to get stuff done, help achieve some progressive political victories, which makes me identify with political leaders. My time at Harvard, I’m afraid to say, has done much to encourage this identification, this belief that political change comes primarily from those in suits, those in position of at least moderate power.

This transformation toward moderateness probably happens to everyone as they get older. What I worry about is that this trend, combined with my intense business in my career, has made me what I’ve always detested: an upper-class, bleeding-heart liberal who politically does nothing but pontificates a lot.

Posted by ecologist at 09:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The past couple months have actually looked somewhat rosy for progressives, as President Bush’s poll numbers have continued to drop and the public increasingly realizes that maybe invading Iraq wasn’t such a good idea after all. It all puts a smile on my face, as someone who opposed the invasion of Iraq from the start, and who was a participant in the massive anti-war demonstrations beforehand. And yet, as the body count of American soldiers approaches 2000, with many times more Iraqi civilian casualties, the moment seems bittersweet. The scientist in me asks, could the protests before the war have really worked?

The historical record suggests that under the right conditions a protest movement can help cease a war that has already begun, contrary to some of the negative critiques of David Corn and others. Vietnam would be the first example to pop into the head of many Americans, for arguably the anti-war protests played at least a minor role in the decision to slowly withdraw, along with the daily casualties of United States personnel. The French withdrawal from Algeria might be another example, although here too it was more the deaths and chaos in Algeria that was responsible for the French desire to withdraw, than the statements and protests by French socialists and the pieds-noir. Two conditions seem to be necessary for protests in the occupier’s country to have any effect at all on the occupier’s foreign policy. First, the conflict must have become bloody and costly. Second, that cost must have led to widespread resentment of the conflict by everyday people, not just those involved in the protests. As both these conditions are true in the case of the current occupation of Iraq, I see no reason the anti-war movement cannot have some effect on how quickly and effectively the U.S. begins withdrawing from Iraq.

However, there are almost no examples of a protest movement in the aggressor country stopping a war before it begins, by sheer moral force. There are a few examples where strong negative public reaction has resulted in the delay of a particular invasion- Bill Clinton, for example, clearly considered invading Iraq in the last years of his presidency, but may have backed away from this because there was such a vociferous opposition to the idea among Americans (remember the heckling at Ohio State University?). But in general, countries with a dominant military will attack other countries with regularity. From 1775 to 1914, the British Empire fought at least 19 wars, which works out to one conflict every 7 years! From 1945 till the present, the United States fought at least 8 wars, or about one conflict every 8 years. Interestingly, the reasons for the wars were all quite idiosyncratic, so there seems to be no way to predict the justification for wars in advance. This is not to say that the justification was just an excuse by the country’s leaders, or that the logic that led to war at the time did not make sense to many of those involved. Indeed, some of the wars may be quite ethically justifiable (e.g., attacking Japan after Pearl Harbor, the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States after 9/11).

The scary corollary to this trend is: the United States will invade another country again! If we assume that our military will remain at its current strength, well above the capabilities of other countries, it seems quite likely that there will be another invasion sometime soon. The circumstances under which this invasion will occur, the political form it will take, is utterly unknowable. We might safely predict that the United States won’t attack another democracy, for the historical record suggests it’s rare for one democracy to attack another. And we can safely predict it will be a relatively weak country, given that the majority of wars are between countries with profoundly different military strength. Other than that, who knows? Maybe Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba…

Is there some kind of movement, then, that will be effective in stopping the next war? Let’s call this line of thinking preventive anti-war organizing. I’ve become convinced that it is the only real hoping of building a more peaceful world in the future. Think of it as a sprinkler system installed in a new building; one hopes it never has to be used, but if the flames of war ever come, it will be there to dampen them. One potential possibility, of course, is to simply strengthen the marvelous global network that developed around the February 15, 2003 protests against the invasion of Iraq. If 10 million people can be marshaled for a protest with only six months of real organizing, it should be possible to get many times more people out to protest the next war with years of preparation.

It’s doubtful, however, that this alone is enough. Governments, even democratic governments, seem to have an amazing ability to ignore domestic opposition to foreign policy objectives. There is a real need for new ideas at an international level that will help to restrain the U.S. before the next war. The U.S. has one severe weakness right now, its dependence on foreign investment to finance its trade and budget deficits. Perhaps a set of boycotts of U.S. bonds by prominent investors and central banks, to be initiated at the start of a military conflict not approved by the United Nations Security council, would be an ambitious starts. Even a very small boycott would create ripples through U.S. financial markets simply by exposing to the media the vulnerability of the U.S. economy. It’s a crazy idea, perhaps, one that a few years ago I would have dismissed as absurd and unworkable. But the Iraq war has changed the way we all view global security, has made the globe’s people more aware of the risks of having a single unchallenged hegemon, and perhaps the time has truly come for preventive anti-war organizing.

Posted by ecologist at 08:56 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Is it just me, or does all of Anglophone culture seem to be overdosing on Bob Dylan nostalgia? Most of this media saturation is due, of course, to Martin Scorsese’ new biography of Dylan, in what must surely be one of the better run PR campaigns of the new millennium. Oddly, most of the media discussion has followed faithfully Scorsese’ narrative of Dylan’s life: from obscurity to his peak moment of fame, culminating in an act of rebellion (Dylan’s famous interaction with the “Judas” heckler), and ignoring many of Dylan’s later (more complex) artistic works. To me, having grown up in the perpetual political and cultural shadow of the baby-boom generation, all this seems a bit hedonistic and self-congratulatory. It’s part of a general 1960’s obsession that both the right and the left share.

This obsession is particularly dangerous with Iraq. The central metaphor driving all discussion is “Iraq = Vietnam.” Liberals are happy to drive home this metaphor to increase public opposition to the war in Iraq. Conservatives reify the metaphor by so insistently denying it. Everyone in the U.S. seems to base their arguments on it. While this is understandable, given the psychic scars to Americans from the Vietnam debacle, it seems ludicrously odd to those in other countries. The domino theory of communism has given rise to the reverse domino theory of democracy, and while this argument may make sense in America because of the Vietnam experience, it seems bizarre elsewhere.

There are substantial differences between Vietnam and Iraq, in the geopolitical realities, in the mode of combat, and in the terrain. I worry that Americans are so caught up with the Vietnam metaphor that we are blind to ways in which it is untrue. And by tying into the metaphor, the anti-war movement has reignited some of the cultural issues of the 1960’s that simply don’t apply now, when the movement is more age-diverse than in the 1960’s. Truthfully, there is no way the protests against the war will achieve the chaos of those against Vietnam- nor should we aspire to that. I don’t have a solution for this mismatch, except to suggest we put forth other metaphors. Let’s talk about Britain’s experiences in Iraq during their colonial occupation- those experiences are far more relevant to what is going on today in Iraq than anything that happened a generation ago in Vietnam.

Posted by ecologist at 08:55 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve just returned from traveling in Morocco the past couple weeks, and while my mind is full of lots of vivid images of the places, my thoughts keep turning again and again to … architecture.

The rest of this article is posted on Urban Cartography.

Posted by ecologist at 08:54 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm about to go overseas for a little vacation. Travelling internationally has come to seem fairly routine for me now, as my in-laws live outside the United States. Part of me feels proud of this, like to makes me more cultured or something. I know, though, that it will take far longer than my brief visits to foreign countries to begin to understand the viewpoints of their citizens. Still, even the momentary flashes of comprehension that I've experienced have been edifying, something to take me out of the U.S. cultural bubble in which I live. I can't help believing in that age-old belief of most liberals, that multicultural contact leads, on the average and in the long-term, to more peaceful coexistence between cultures.

I've been wondering more and more if this is true, however. One of my relatives, accompanying me on this trip, is a hardcore Texan, and she's been constantly talking about how much these foreigners hate America. I suspect she will go overseas looking for that and find it. A postmodernist might even argue that that's all tourists ever see, those facts and images that fit what their psyche has prepared them to see. In some way a sinister fact from recent terrorist events supports this theory: many of the terrorists had spent large portions of their lives in the country they attacked, and yet their heart was not softened by this contact.

Is it tenable anymore to believe contact, simple contact between cultures, can reduce hatred? And if not, what more is needed? This seems to me a question of preeminent importance in our globalizing world.

Posted by ecologist at 08:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Israeli pullout of Gaza is finally over, the last settler moved. I’m heartened by the progress on the ground, the sense that on at least a part of the occupied territory the Palestinians have their land back, and in parts of Israel some citizens are probably safer. Nonetheless, there are so many unknowns that a few fears keep gnawing at me. The unilateral character of Israel’s pullout, while perhaps necessary given the lack of real control by the Palestinian Authority, has left Gaza chaotic. The whole moment seems a curious mélange of promise and peril, and only time will tell which will win out.

Given this complex reality, I’ve been amazed at the lack of detailed discussion in the mainstream American media. The focus has overwhelmingly been on the settlers, many thousands of images of their anguish. At one point this weekend, the emphasis reached the level of absurdity on NPR, which chose to air a clip in which a Holocaust survivor compared the current nonviolent, financially-compensated relocation by a democratically-elected government with the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. Before and after the clip, NPR provided little context into when, where, and how Israel annexed the land, nor what the likely affect on Israeli security would be. What's worse, Palestinian voices were essentially absent from the discussion. How odd it is that even our most trustworthy news stations went for a simplistic analysis and some striking quotes, rather than in-depth analysis.

Posted by ecologist at 08:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been reading a large collection of John Locke’s political writings recently and somehow they make me keep thinking of the invasion of Iraq. There’s this odd concept of sovereignty floating around in Locke’s writing, a spirit he tries hard to banish, at least in his later works. From our modern perspective, especially in America, we don’t think about sovereignty as a single entity, invested in a single person, but rather we envision a set of checks and balances- sovereignty is diffuse but all pervasive among the American people. This perspective, at least in large part, comes from Locke. The older ghost he was fighting against was the sense of sovereignty as an absolute, an absolute power invested in an absolute monarch. Locke’s viewpoint is, of course, immeasurably more tolerant of peaceful dissent than the old ghost, for dissent is to Locke but one mechanism by which the system of sovereignty operates.

And as I read, I began to realize that human history has seen a number of battles over the nature of sovereignty, with each battle occurring at a larger spatial scale. As modern nation-states were formed, there were undoubtedly those who argue that absolute sovereignty rested in one’s tribe or clans, and that all politics above that level are essentially anarchic. Then, there were those who agued that absolute sovereignty must at least rest in a single person, for the only other alternative is anarchy. And now we live in an age where it is commonplace to think of sovereignty spread diffusely among the citizens of nations, but many conservatives argue strongly that the relationships between states are essentially anarchic. We progressives have said, and must continue to say, no to this limitation.

This brings me back to the Iraq invasion. The millions who marched in the streets to try to stop the invasion have become demoralized by their defeat. The only consolation, perhaps, was the New York Times proclamation that the protestors were the “world’s other superpower.” We should take some comfort in the phrase, as recognition of our strength, but we should acknowledge the metaphor is wrong. We do not want to be a superpower, in an anarchic battle with other superpowers. Rather, we want to be a powerful check in a global system of checks-and-balances, in a global system of sovereignty.

To put it another way: the anti-war contingent lost not because the United States is too strong but because the global system of checks and balances is too weak. But to whom can we look to strengthen the global system of sovereignty? The United Nations is unlikely to save much of a barrier, as its structure forces all real power to the Security Council, where the United States has dominance. Global civil society, as we saw in February 2002, can exert pressure but is relatively powerless if its protests are mostly linguistic. What are some other possible ways to make the check against United States aggression stronger? Perhaps international unions, like the dockworkers in major ports, could agree to a week-long boycott of transporting United States products. Perhaps the EU countries and Japan could agree to a temporary moratorium on buying United States Treasury bonds. A whole series of little steps like this must be developed, at an international level, to exert our global collective sovereignty over the nation-states of the world, to finally exorcise the ghost.

Posted by ecologist at 08:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

More and more, I hear people whispering the word now in mainstream American political discourse, sometimes even saying it aloud: “Empire.” It’s still a shock for me to hear it, for it strikes me as discordant, horrible, wrong. Even during my brief time working in DC, when I got a whiff of how rarified the air is inside the beltway, it puzzled me. I still remember my surprise when I heard that Vaclav Havel, whose writing and political philosophy I greatly admire, was co-sponsor of a debate at the American Enterprise Institute entitled “American is now and should be an Empire.” I believe Paul Wolfowitz attended.

I think to most Americans, the E-word remains a taboo, however much it has penetrated the discussions of the political class. We honestly cannot fathom the existence of an entity within ourselves so contrary to our essence. Imagine: the President of the United States stands up in the Rose Garden and announces our intention invade country Y “to strengthen our military position and further expand our Empire.” All hell would break loose among the Washington press corp.

Still, perhaps I overstate the innocence of Americans in this regard. Maybe every nation always can find a way to rationalize anything. Perhaps the Brits really thought they were spreading civilization. Perhaps the Romans really thought the Pax Romana was in everyone’s interest. Perhaps, too, future civilizations will laugh at our conception of an “Accidental Empire.”

Ironically enough, the founders of the United States, and most especially Madison and Jefferson, openly discussed America’s imperial ambitions after her independence. The interior of the country seemed open for expansion, save for a few Native Americans who were powerless to stop it. Indeed, the central debate was not about whether American would gain an Empire, but whether in the process she would lose her revolutionary soul. The answer generally, tentatively, was yes, the historical record often shows that Empire corrupts democracy. And that answer should give us pause, as politicians ponder ways to expand United States hegemony.

Or more to the point, given America’s financial weakness and our difficulty maintaining our military: when our Empire declines, will we go like the Brits, who managed to maintain their democracy and stability during their loss, or like the Romans, who degenerated into a military dictatorship?

Posted by ecologist at 08:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

All throughout Boston there are whispered conversations… in French. In the French Cultural Center, where I take classes, ex-pats gather in little groups, trying to figure out on what street near Copley it is located. It is the French Consulate, and it may seem odd to Americans that all the excitement is over an election, something only 1 in 2 of us Americans seem to bother participating in. What may seem even odder to Americans, given our penchant for musing about the black helicopters at the UN, is that this is not a national election everyone is so excited about, but an international one. On May 29, France will vote on whether to ratify the new European Union constitution. The coverage in the press in the United States continually betrays a sense of profound confusion: why in the world would someone want to give up some sovereignty to a higher body?

Nevertheless, Americans should care, and care deeply, about what happens on May 29. Globalization, the process of increasingly rapid connection between peoples by commerce and information flows, has been much attached from both ends of the political spectrum, but will continue its inevitable march onward over the next 20 years. There are now two main models for how this can proceed. The current U.S.-backed paradigm is one where economic globalization continues apace, while politics remains firmly national. NAFTA is a prime example of the kind of treaty that results from such a worldview; it’s loaded with special provisions for big companies, but workers had little say in the design of the treaty. The current EU process also involves a lot of economic liberalization, some of it with questionable public utility (that’s why it’s in such trouble right now in France, as people rightly question some of its economic effects). In contrast to the U.S. paradigm, however, it also involves considerable political integration. In principle, at least, democracy is globalized as well as economics. If this sounds idealistic and experimental, it’s because it is. The current EU is the greatest political experiment of the last 25 years: an uneasy truce between Beethoven and capitalism.

The important thing for Americans to realize is that economic globalization is coming, one way or another. What is up for debate is its character, its soul. Democracy can either rise to globalization, or it will sink beneath it.

Posted by ecologist at 08:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I saw George Monbiot speak at Duke University a couple years back, and I was impressed by the passion of his talk. I even bought a copy of his book, Manifesto for a New World Order, which I almost never do after such seminars. I recently reread the book, to sort through what in it I agree with and what in it I do not. I take issue with some of his specific solutions. I’m also more of a moderate politically than Monbiot, so it makes for awkward reading in spots. Nevertheless, the book is very important just for pointing out how manifestly undemocratic the current global system of governance is. Furthermore, Monbiot vigorously defends the need to strive for something more democratic than the current global system of governance: “If you consider this distribution of power acceptable, that is your choice, but please do not call yourself a democrat. If you consider yourself a democrat, you must surely acknowledge the need for radical change.”

The proposal in the book that most grabbed my imagination was for a global parliament, as a compliment to or replacement for the United Nations and its one-nation-one-vote paradigm. Monbiot points out that this proposal is repulsive to many in the developed world, simply because of the overwhelming dominance in the system of the developing countries, due to their large populations. As a landscape ecologist and a geographer, I was interested in how this would look on a map. Below is a map of 400 voting blocks of approximately equal population, based on the excellent global grid of population in 1995 available from the Columbia Earth Institute. First of all, let me say what this map is NOT: It is not an attempt to put forth a reasonable set of voting districts (which would be rather arrogant of me, as such things are always the outcome of a political process), nor is it an endorsement necessarily of Monbiot’s scheme for a world parliament. The idea is to get people thinking about how political power would be distributed if every person on earth had equal voting power. While national boundaries are shown on the map to help orient the reader, they were not used at all in the creation of these voting districts, and so the districts freely span national boundaries when population densities require that. Note the high density of small regions in southeastern Asia, particularly India and China- this is simply due to the high population density in these places.

Click on the thumbnail to the left to view a global map and a close-up of southeast Asia. Each color is a region with around 15 million people.

Now, technical details on how this was made: Population data were taken from the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), Columbia University; International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); and World Resources Institute (WRI). 2000. Gridded Population of the World (GPW), Version 2. Palisades, NY: CIESIN, Columbia University. Available at http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/plue/gpw. This gives population estimates in latitude/longitude for cells that are about 5km on a side near the equator. To perform my calculations in a projection system that is more equal-area than geographic, the grid was projected into a Robinson projection, which is reasonably equal-area between 45 and -45 latitude, and doesn’t have the high distortion of shape and distance at high latitudes that a true equal-are projection (e.g., sinusoidal projection) would. The current algorithm for dividing the world’s population into geographic blocks is very crude (this is why it’s so boxy), and is literally just what I could do last night when I had a couple hours of spare time.

1. Global population, excluding any already assigned persons, is summed in an X by X resolution grid for the whole globe, starting with small values of X like 50km.
2. If any cells in this grid are within the target population range (10 million to 20 million), they are saved as one voting district.
3. The global population grid is recalculated to exclude folks assigned in #2.
4. Increase the size of X slightly and repeat steps 1-4 until all areas of the globe are classified.

Now, there is an algorithm that’s quite similar to the algorithm used for spatially-constrained clustering that could be used with this data, where individual cells are agglomerated until the target size is reached. This algorithm would give much smoother looking voting districts, but I think I’d have to spend a couple days writing custom code to do it (there are, after all, some 24 million cells in the population grid), and I just don’t have the time!

Posted by ecologist at 08:24 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I ended up, quite by chance, in a crowd of about 10,000 people gathered in downtown Raleigh, NC, to rally against the planned US invasion of Iraq. It was 15 February 2003, and around the world protests were taking   place, urging the US to give the inspectors more time. I've been thinking of   that day often recently, of how it was full of hope and optimism and a surprising sense of global solidarity, of how naive all such sentiments seem now, as I   read Thomas Friedman's book Longitudes and Attitudes, which is really just a collection of his N.Y. Times pieces for the last several years. One essay in particular has been sticking in my head, from 2 February 2003, in which Friedman contrasts American optimism, our belief that we can really change the world for the better, with European "cynicism and insecurity."  I too think there's something wonderfully optimistic about the American character,   a willingness to call the future a blank slate, to declare that the "past   is a bucket of ashes," as Sandburg once said. Still, there is something   that strikes me as wrong with Friedman's argument.

In Barcelona alone, a city only three times bigger than Raleigh, somewhere close to a million people demonstrated. To dismiss this entire showing as displaced  jealousy of America and nostalgia for an old colonial empire, as Friedman does, is to miss the point. Whenever millions of people come out for an event like   February 15, there will be a diversity of motivations, and perhaps a few Europeans   were motivated by the nationalistic desires that Friedman attributes to them.   Many more, however, truly believed they were sending an honest humanitarian   message to the world, which when you stop to think about it is an amazingly   optimistic thing to do, given the state of international politics. Seen in this light, most Europeans were (and are) profoundly optimistic about the future, in that they can envision a world not ruled by any particular county or empire   but governed by an (occasionally bureaucratic) community of nations. In contrast,   most Americans, or at least American politicians, seem to envision the future   as fundamentally about the extension and maintenance of the American Empire-  the only disagreement among the political parties is how bare-knuckled we should   be about it. What's so optimistic about that, Mr. Friedman?

Posted by ecologist at 07:41 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)