The cosmopolitan ecologist

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I’ve been traveling over the holidays, first to Brittany and now to Catalonia. It strikes me that despite the many differences- in language and cuisine and temperament- between them, the two regions have something in common.

Both are jealously guarding their cultural and linguistic heritage, and attempting to regain a sense of cultural independence from their nation.
Brittany has celtic roots, including a celtic language Breton, which have persisted despite Gallic dominion for centuries. They maintained this independence mostly intact (it seems like every Breton village has a pub named Duchess Anne) until the French revolution centralized power and crushed the last vestiges of independence. In recent decades there’s been a resurgence of interest in Breton culture, with signs everywhere listing place names in Breton, although it’s still rare to hear somebody actually speaking Breton. In one store I even saw a T-shirt that redrew the iconic photo of Che Guevara to make him look like a Breton farmer.  This was at least more politically accurate than the last French reinterpretation of Che Guevara I saw, a diamond-encrusted sweater for sale on the rue St.-Germain.

Catalonia has followed much the same trajectory. A great deal of cultural independence, the last traces of which were crushed by Franco, followed in recent decade by a resurgence of regional pride. Catalan is commonly spoken, giving it a life Breton lacks.

There’s something paradoxical about this regional resurgence of cultural independence at a time when the EU is attempting greater integration. Perhaps it’s because the EU reforms are at an economic and political level, whereas the “cultural independence” of Brittany (at least) is at a more symbolic level. When nation-states felt weak they wanted to erase regional differences, whereas now in the EU regional differences become a valuable tourist and marketing attraction.

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It has been an odd week in climate change and presidential politics. John Edwards made an excellent speech where he referred to climate change as “the great moral test of our generation.” And so it is, for what humanity does in the next couple decades will determine the climate our grandchildren inherit. In the same week Edwards gave this powerful address, Hillary Clinton got caught staging a question about climate change at a campaign event in Iowa. What’s worse, her answer to the canned question wasn’t even that inspired or well written!

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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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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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I grew up in Chapel Hill, and even though I’ve ended up living in Cambridge I’ve kept track of what’s going on in my hometown. John Edwards has been a bit of a local celebrity for years now- heck, I even have friends of friends down there that helped build his house! Some part of me has always been rooting for his campaign out of a desire to see a local do good.

Still, I kept my distance from the campaign. I’m an environmental scientist, and scientists are notoriously reticent about getting involved with politics and losing our objectivity. Conserving the environment and stopping global warming are big issues for me, and I was waiting to see which Democratic candidate took a strong stance.

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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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I write these words from the math library of Jussieu, on the left bank of the Seine. It is a clean, well-lighted place, with cheerful hardwood veneer tables and daylight streaming in the skylight. Nevertheless, it’s not the kind of place whose grandeur inspires, like the older style reading rooms that Mario Vargas Llosa eulogized. The ceilings are oppressively low, perhaps to save on the cost of construction, and a sunken courtyard has been thoroughly colonized by ragweed and autumn olive, growing disorderly in a heap. The library epitomizes the whole campus: space-age but somehow decrepit and a bit unfriendly. A friend who attended Jussieu told me it was designed after the tumultuous events of 1968, when students occupied most university campuses in France [I have since heard from someone else that Jussieu was almost certainly built a few years earlier than the events of 1968]. With this eventuality in mind, the architect allowed for numerous entrances to each building, and broad unenclosed courtyards, to reduce the possibility of an effective blockade. Perhaps because of this, the campus lacks a clear visual focus (excepting for the surrounding Latin Quarter, which is gorgeous), with no central entrance or portico providing a memorable vista.

It occurs to me that U.S. universities haven’t taken this step, and in fact are returning to more traditional-looking architecture after some experimentation in the 1970s and 1980s. Perhaps in part this is because the political activity and organization is so much lower among U.S. students. In a sense, American universities have sanitized their students rather than their architecture. This programme has been so successful, thanks not just to the universities but also to the broader American distrust of political organization, that the fervor of the anti-Vietnam war era is totally gone, replaced with an emphasis on achieving a profitable career. In the current context, constructing new buildings in a classical style serves to retain and strengthen the university’s brand. This is the true goal of many (but not all) American university administrators: to be able to say not just that a student received an education, but that they received our brand of education.

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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.

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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.

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Major protects continued this week in Paris, as students and some unions agitated against a new labor law that makes it easier to higher and fire young workers. In the Anglo-American press, the protests have generally been portrayed as a bunch of unruly kids, causing trouble. Let’s leave aside the very real policy dilemma this law tried to solve, and look instead at this characterization of French students as unruly or, even darker, “ungovernable.” This characterization is actually common whenever we discuss France, and I believe its overtones are ominous signs of our lack of respect for democracy.

Larry Summers’ ouster from his post as Harvard is another example of this canard. In the media, it is often describe as a coup by a small cabal of liberal faculty out to get Dr. Summers since he wasn’t politically correct enough. Forget for a second whether you agree with Dr. Summers’ policies or not: couldn’t one just as correctly say “a large plurality of the faculty had no confidence in his leadership, and voted to remove him”? But no, instead Harvard is now the “ungovernable university.”

I believe this particular concept of “ungovernability” is a covert attack on democracy. Democracy is participation in power, as Cicero once famously wrote. Interest groups within a democracy must have enough freedom to reflect on what is in their political interest, and then have appropriate power to agitate for what they want. Granted, the process of reflection must be reasoned and measured, not a mob mentality; granted, the amount of power an interest group can wield should not be disproportionate with their support among the general populace nor inconsistent with fundamental rights (I believe it is this caveat being violated that led New York City to be called the “ungovernable city”). However, if both these caveats obtain,, then we must view protest and agitation as an integral part of democracy.

The students in France have thought deeply about what is good for them, and are fighting for it. While we might argue that their position is not ideal for France as a whole, we must admit that the students know their own interests better than we do! Similarly, the faculty thought deeply about the Summers regime, and realized they wanted him gon. Within his constituency, therefore, it was rational that he was forced out, even if many outside Harvard were not pleased. In short, when the Anglo-American press calls a group “ungovernable” it is usually because they have the temerity to govern themselves! Behind this conception of “ungovernability” is a deep elitism, an idea that a certain elite group knows better than “they” what is best for them, and since the result desired is not occurring, the system must be flawed. Nothing could be further from the idea of democracy; vigorous and strident political debate is not inimical to democracy, but essential to it.

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I just finished reading Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, and I must admit to being pleasantly surprised. I went into the work with a dislike of the book absorbed from dozens of leftist writers, who often described it as an unapologetic celebration of the victory of unbridled capitalism. I was amused to see it for sale, therefore, at an airport book kiosk (the selection of philosophy books in airports is truly bizarre), and flabbergasted to find that I agreed with Fukuyama’s main points. There has been an empirical trend over the last two centuries, and both Fukuyama and I are quite happy about it, although I disagree with his characterization of the process of democratization as inevitable in a Hegelian sense (as opposed to just highly probable and highly desirable). We both agree that what drives most people to overthrow authoritarian regimes and install democratic regimes is the desire for recognition, or thymos. We both believe that to some extent the appearance of civil liberties is correlated with economic liberties, although we might disagree about the arrow of causality. And we both fundamentally feel that De Tocqueville was right: there is sometimes a tradeoff between equality and liberty.

However, Fukuyama’s work reminds me of a general malady in philosophy: any sufficiently abstract philosophy can be made to support an author’s political and class interests. He sees the particular form of economic development known as the Washington Consensus as a positive thing, even though it is far from pure economic liberty. He sees military adventures to spread democracy at the barrel of a gun as a good thing, presaging the current Bush Doctrine. Most oddly, he sees efforts to reform and strengthen the United Nations as an evil effort: democracy within nation-states is good, but apparently democracy between nation-states is bad!

Still, fundamentally Fukuyama and I agree about what should be the United States’ goal in foreign policy, to help make the world more democratic, even if we disagree about the means to get there. How sad then that (it appears) the Democratic party establishment has abandoned this noble goal and seems to offer only “realism” as an alternative to Bush’s crusades. We are the party of true democracy at home, as we push to make sure every eligible voter can have their vote accurately counted. We are the party of true democracy abroad, as we push Bush to work through the United Nations Security Council to peacefully restrain Iran’s nuclear program. Why then have we ceded this ideological ground? What is the Democratic party, if we are not the champions of democracy?!

Posted by ecologist at 09:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Rip Van Winkle took his famous nap on the outskirts of Palenville in the Catskill Mountains. In Washington Irving's original story, Rip slept for only 20 years, managing to miss the entire American Revolution in the process. Let us imagine that Rip, being incredibly long-lived due to his many hours of restorative sleep, is still wandering around the Hudson Valley. How different it must look to him! The New York City megalopolis alone now holds more Americans than the Empire State and all of New England did in 1900. Rip has just been the witness to one of the most dramatic transformations of the last century, the shift from a rural to urban existence for the vast majority of Americans. In 1900, 60% of the U.S. population was rural. Today, less than 25% of the population is. It was a transformation that changed the very character of life for Americans, and drove a series of political and cultural changes that continue today.

I've heard that Rip Van Winkle has grown tired again. This time, however, in his quest to find a quiet place to rest his head, he's ventured to a calm spot along the China coast. What can Rip expect to see when he awakens, another 50 or 100 years hence?

See the rest on my post at Z Net:

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=56&ItemID=9355

Posted by ecologist at 09:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I just finished re-reading Naomi Klein’s "No Logo", and this time through it struck me as somehow seeming a little dated. I don’t know if this is a function of how much I’ve changed since the late 1990s, or how much the world has changed. It’s not that her argument seems now incorrect; on the contrary, I think most of her critique of the branding of the world is still valid. Corporations are still taking over public space, filling the landscape with ads. More generally, the objects of so much protest by progressives during the later 1990s – the WTO, the WEF – still exist in mostly the same anti-democratic form, only slightly reformed since then.  It’s just that her critique seems rather less relevant now, to the current political dilemma we all find ourselves in.

The horrible events of 9/11 reshaped the U.S. political landscape, as they should have, and reminded progressives that there are far worse visions of the future than the corporate-branded world that Klein predicts in No Logo.  One of those is a world controlled by religious fundamentalists, of any creed, and gripped by fear. George Bush’s invasion of Iraq also reminded progressives that there are far more important political goals to fight for in this world than simply pushing back against corporate dominance. The question of how to build some sort of peaceful alternative to a Pax Americana now seems crucial. Somehow (and this is something I’m struggling with myself) there has to be a way to reintegrate some of the campaigns of the late 1990s with the current anti-war work, in a more explicit way. After all, they all share a similar theme: democracy, the participation of the broadest possible set of people in the power to shape their global society.

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

The release of the Internet movie EPIC 2014 has gotten a lot of buzz recently in the blogosphere, including a discussion in On The Media on NPR last week. For the most part, notwithstanding some comments during the beginning and end, the movie marvels at the beautiful dream of the Internet: it will somehow allow the media to whither away, and allow us all to become the media. It is a beautiful aesthetic, in its own way. Still, it strikes me as just as improbable as the idea that information technology will allow all national borders to whither away. Or, more to the point, it strikes me as just as improbable as the communist ideal that the state will slow whither away- a convenient fiction based more in desire than in any real facts.

Maybe all of us in the blogosphere should ask ourselves, what good are the mainstream media (in the broad sense of the phrase) so often ridiculed in our webpages? Could we live without them? I think the answer to this is a firm no. We might recognize three main information-generating functions of media (not that these exist a priori, but they are a useful categorization). First, they repeat and retransmit basic facts (“The President today said that…”). Second, they offer up opinions and analyses of these basic facts (“Why do you think President Bush said that, Mr. Novak?”). Third, they ferret out more fundamental facts, facts that often powerful people and agencies would like to remain hidden (e.g., Woodward and Bernstein and the Deep Throat affair).

The first two functions are being made easier and easier by the Internet, and EPIC 2014 is right insofar as it pictures this process becoming more automatic and personalized. Any one interested enough to read about the President’s speech can read the transcript or see the video minutes after it occurs, making a summary article about it the next day in the newspaper nonessential for transmitting the basic facts. The over-abundance of blogs means that there are a plethora of opinions and analyses of all the basic facts of the day floating around the Internet, making newspaper columnists not necessarily unimportant (they are often quite good at what they do- that’s how they got the job!) but only one of many voices discussing the news. The New York Times decision, for example, to put only their columnists behind their pay wall shows that the management there might not get it- the columnists are arguably the most dispensable part of what the Times provides. The third function, however, has become if anything more important in the Internet era. The hard work of digging up fundamental facts requires people who can focus full-time on it, with support staff helping them and an institution dedicated to helping them. Very few bloggers have that set-up, with the exception of some of the extremely dedicated or the extremely wealthy.

The world as envisioned by EPIC 2014 visualizes news being managed by big corporations and free-wheeling bloggers. In that world, news will be “superficial”, as EPIC 2014 itself acknowledges. It’s time for bloggers to get over their distrust of the MSM, and work to find financially-stable ways for fundamental facts to make their way into cyberspace. Otherwise, it will all just be a media landscape "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
       

Posted by ecologist at 09:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Previously, I’ve attempted to construct voting districts for the whole world, with an equal number of people in each one. This all stems from a proposal in George Monbiot’s book calling 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. My previous algorithm for mapping this was very crude, and came up with very square-looking voting districts. My current algorithm allows the boundaries of districts to follow gradients in population density, and is a great improvement.

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 thumbnails below to view a global map and close up maps of a variety of areas. Each color is a region with around 15 million people. Note that these are high-resolution JPEGs  (600 DPI) that don't always display well in a browser, but if you download them they look and print great in something like Photoshop.

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-area projection (e.g., sinusoidal projection) would. The algorithm starts with the densest cell, and begins joining it with its neighbors, starting with its most dense neighbor. This process continues until the target population is reached. This district is then considered finished, and taken out of consideration, and the algorithm then goes to the next highest cell. This algorithm works quite well except in places where there’s little or no population (like northern Canada), where there are no gradients in population density to guide the placement of boundaries. The other place it occasionally fails is when there is a large city (5-10 million people) surrounded by an area of almost no population. In this case, the final district created will tend to be over my target of 15 million, as this city will get lumped in with another big one a fair distance away.

The philosophy behind this algorithm is that people who live near one another should be in same voting district, whenever possible, regardless of which country they are in. This leads to an urban-centric definition of boundaries. Take a good look at New York City, for example- the core of the city gets one voting district, while the suburbs get another. This may upset the people from the suburbs (folks from northern New Jersey often want to claim allegiance to NYC), but it is a necessary consequence of having the many millions of people in the NYC core voting together. In any event, one could argue that the suburbs of New Jersey are more like the suburbs of the lower Hudson Valley than the core of NYC, so it may be appropriate that they vote together.

Posted by ecologist at 09:05 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)

In a moment of post-modern horror and giddy shock, I discovered yesterday that a friend of mine has a page in Wikipiedia, all about her. Indeed, Wikipedia seems to be everywhere now on the web. Almost every Google search returns some kind of Wikipedia page, and the project claims some 500,000 people have contributed material. There’s even a rather arcane set of neologisms that have cropped up in the set of people involved in the project, which I can’t pretend to understand- my favorite is “inclusionist” versus “deletionist”, which mirrors plant taxonomy’s “lumpers” and “splitters”.

It struck me this morning that this beautiful, quixotic project is a lot like the project of the French Encylopedists. The goal of their Encyclopedia was something larger than today’s encyclopedias: they wanted to contain all essential human knowledge about the arts and sciences, which was interpreted so broadly to mean just about everything. While the information was presented in a relatively objective fashion, the very concept of the Encyclopedia was a statement of Enlightment belief that knowledge and rationality would conquer most problems.

Maybe the creation of every new communication media breeds something like the French Encylopedists, for there’s a strong desire to systematize all the new content that multiples so rapidly. Wikipedia, like the French Encylopedists, both try to categorize knowledge into a logical hierarchy. And both efforts, while in theory “neutral,” imply a certain set of political beliefs, the belief that something like objective fact is possible. Ultimately, the French Encylopedists failed to categorize all knowledge, but they did breed a durable set of encyclopedias that served millions of students well. Similarly, Wikipedia is bound to fail, particularly as the subjects in some of its pages get even more arcane and contemporary, for the subject may change faster than the page can. Still, the Wikipedia has managed to make itself a largely decentralized system, and it is possible the set of pages created by these hundred of thousand of authors will persist over quite a long time. Oh, how Diderot would have been proud!

Posted by ecologist at 08:58 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