The need for humility in the face of ignorance

Burl Hall has written an interesting op-ed on humility, in light of Invisible Nature. He ties it into obedience violence and the Milgram experiments and into some writing that his wife, Merry Hall wrote in response to my book. Take a look…

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Healing-the-Destructive-Di-by-Burl-Hall-Children_Crisis_Culture_Ethics-131004-891.html

The Green Mind at Psychology Today

I recently launched my new blog over at Psychology Today: The Green Mind. Please check it out. Some of the posts the I write there will appear here as well, but the two blogs will have some differences as well, with more more psychology-focused entries there.

My first post on The Green Mind is an introduction to the ideas in my book Invisible Nature. See below.

News of environmental problems seems endless: worsening climate change, radioactive landscapes, flooded coastal cities, species going extinct. It can seem depressing and overwhelming. The world appears out of control, and the problems seem abstract. How do they relate to our daily lives? How can we regain control over our environmental impacts? Read More.

My book Invisible Nature is out!

My book Invisible Nature: Healing the Destructive Divide between People and the Environment has just been released by Prometheus Books.

Join me in celebrating! If you’re in the Berkeley area this August, please come to my book release party: Wednesday, August 21, 6pm, University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, California. 
 
InvisibleNature_Flyer med

The Nuclear Ghost Towns of Japan

Google recently released a “street view” of Namie, one of the abandoned cities near the melted-down Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactors. So now you can stroll through the town and see eerie images of lonely bicycles, headstones scattered by the tsunami, weeds taking over yards, and fully stocked soda vending machines sitting idle by the side of the road. Traversing the town by street view gives you a palpable feeling of the emptiness.

The Atlantic Monthly has collected some of the most haunting images: http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/03/google-maps-a-japanese-nuclear-ghost-town/100482/

They remind me of Pripyat, Ukraine, the small city closest to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2314041/Chernobyl-nuclear-disaster-Eerie-photographs-Helene-Veilleux.html

How many more towns, cities, and landscapes will have to be abandoned, possibly for centuries or millennia, because of our nuclear disasters? How many more children will be deformed by the genetic damages of nuclear radiation, which can be passed down through generations? It seems that we’re ever optimists, always wanting to believe in the latest claims about new technologies that will benefit humankind. Are abandoned cities and landscapes worth it?

At the other end of the scale of this kind of waste lie the empty cities in China being erected in a kind of gold-rush-style real-estate boom, with not enough residents who can afford them: http://www.news.com.au/business/china-building-mega-cities-but-they-remain-empty-sparking-fears-of-housing-bubble-burst/story-e6frfm1i-1226611169281

Empty cities not only litter the landscape, they stand as monuments to the profligate waste of the modern economy. A lot of resources go into making them. To have them then lie unused seems tragic–on top of the human tragedies of our nuclear catastrophes (worldwide cancer deaths from Chernobyl is estimated at around 27,000). Entire landscapes are also uninhabitable by humans.

When these damages are more visible, we tend to react to them more strongly. Just after the Fukushima disaster struck, both Germany and Japan began to pull back on their support for commercial nuclear power. But these effects wear off. We forget and return to the shiny lure of cheap energy. Maybe these pictures will help us remember.

 

Invisible Nature is at the printer

My book Invisible Nature: Healing the Destructive Divide Between People and the Environment, is at the printer, sent there by my publisher Prometheus Books. I’m getting excited for the August 6 release date. I hope you’ll take a look!

Meanwhile, several strong endorsements have rolled in, including one by the esteemed environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott, who calls Invisible Nature “a tour de force.” His endorsement, along with Vandana Shiva’s can be seen here.

We are not alone

In recent years the Slovenian rock-star philosopher Slavoj Žižek has been delighting audiences with an anecdote about the renowned Danish physicist Niels Bohr. A guest to Bohr’s home noticed a horseshoe above the entrance, traditionally mounted above doorways for good luck, and asked the eminent scientist whether he really believed in the power of the horseshoe. Bohr said something like, “No, of course I don’t believe in it. But I’m told that it works even if you don’t believe in it.”

One source puts it the other way around, with Bohr as the visitor, but no matter.

Žižek uses the anecdote to illustrate how ideology permeates culture and society. In the realm of speech, the rational physicist cannot explicitly accept the idea that a horseshoe over the door might affect one’s fate. But the physicist’s action, putting the horseshoe over the door, belies an underlying acceptance of ideology in the form of inherited magical beliefs.

But there’s another way to look at Bohr’s statement: as a tacit acknowledgment that all thought and behavior is social. That is, Bohr himself doesn’t have to believe that the horseshoe will have the power to bring him good luck. It’s enough that the society around him historically holds that belief. It may be enough, in fact, if only a few other people believe in the horseshoe. Bohr is saying that he doesn’t know everything, and he is willing to accept that his knowledge is merely part of a larger system of knowledge in which he is embedded. He accepts that wider knowledge by placing the horseshoe over the door. Knowledge is social and contextual, he implies, and so is being. His beliefs may not be the only important ones. The larger context of each individual life matters. In the case of the horseshoe, the larger context of its history and meaning in European society is not something that Bohr can dismiss readily or completely.

You may be asking yourself, What does any of this have to do with the environment? In my view, as I explain in the book I am working on, context is everything, and modern efforts to remove context in thought and practice are ruining the planet. Our tendency to think of the environment as an inanimate, passive sphere out there, waiting to be known and molded by science and technology for human benefit, resembles treating the horseshoe as merely an inanimate metal object with no historic meaning or power that could possibly be relevant to the present. This way of thinking takes the magic and power out of nature and the horseshoe both, reducing to them to mere objects to be used.

There are many other ways in which the loss of context is harming the environment. In modern life we are radically cut off from the outcomes of many of our daily choices. You flip on a light and add demand to the electrical network. More coal may be burned, releasing greenhouse gases that are mucking up the climate. Sulfur and other pollutants are released as well. But we are so disconnected from all of that, which happens out of sight, that our daily actions can continue unchecked.

The good news is that we still accept some possibility of magic in the horseshoe, even though it’s a manufactured metal object. So perhaps we also accept some possibility of magic in nature, that nature is not an inert and passive realm to be exploited but rather a power to be in partnership with.

On Nauru, a Sinking Feeling

On Nauru, a Sinking Feeling – NYTimes.com.

What do islands tell us about modern human-environment relations?

President Marcus Stephen of Nauru, a tiny island nation in the Pacific about a third the size of Manhattan, urges us in the above op-ed to heed the warning provided by the recent history of his island.

Nauru entered the modern economy full-force in the early 20th century by strip mining and exporting its abundant phosphate around the world, to be used to manufacture explosives and fertilizer. By the 1960’s and 70’s, these exports had given the tiny country one of the highest per-capita incomes in the world. But, in the 1980’s the phosphate ran out: much of the island had been strip mined, and only a ring of fertile (and some built) landscape remained circling the island just inside a narrow outer ring of beach. Today, most of the mined area has just begun to be re-covered by vegetation, but the country’s economy remains fragile, heavily dependent on a few small sources of revenue, which the country uses to import practically everything it needs.

Nauru from space

Life in Nauru seems tenuous. The country can produce very little of what it needs. Its current government is working to replenish some of the natural wealth that was stripped away to supply modern industry elsewhere in the world, but how long will it take to return the island to a rich and productive landscape, particularly since the phosphate, produced by many millennia of bird droppings, as been stripped away to fertilize soils elsewhere in the world? To make matters worse, like many low-lying island nations, Nauru is threatened with becoming partially submerged as global warming melts glaciers, releasing their waters into the oceans.

In less than a century, the nation of Nauru has gone from virtual self sustenance to utter dependence and the possibility of demise. Its participation in the global economy brought it to this point in two ways: not only did the nation sell off its ecological heritage of fertility, but also its exports of guano arguably helped to fuel mechanized, fossil-fuel-driven agriculture and thus the greater exploitation of fossil fuels that has been the principle driver of global climate change, which may well on its own make Nauru uninhabitable.

The point is not to blame Nauruans, however. After all—in the modern global economy, few nations do not mine their resources for momentary gain. American farmers are mining—using up faster than the replacement rate—the Ogallala Aquifer lying below much of the western plain states to produce crops. Many fisheries in the oceans are depleted. Rainforests are felled at unsustainable rates. And so on. We use up nature in many cases as if there is no future, much as the Nauruans did their little island.

The important point, underlined by Mr. Stephen’s commentary, is to learn from this situation, to properly understand Nauru as a sort of microcosm of of the whole Earth—to see what moral, if any, this story tells. Islands have long taught us about environmental folly, and as Richard Grove explains in Green Imperialism: Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860, the experiences of European colonizers on the small islands that they colonized in the Indian and Pacific Oceans and elsewhere, combined with other factors, gave them a new sense of limits of humanity’s uses of nature. Scientists and others studying these places could easily observe entire ecosystems for the first time, the limited numbers of creatures in those ecosystems, extinctions happening before their eyes, and other blatant effects of European resource extractions. Many of the same scientists also superimposed their Edenic ideals on these islands, re-imagining them as places untouched by human activity. Such were the origins of modern environmentalism—much earlier than the supposed late 20th-century origins.

Now, the president of one such island is sounding the alarm, asking us to look once again at what modern economic activity has done to his island, and to act before submersion makes recovery impossible.

Welcome to my blog

Hello and welcome to my newly minted blog. I hope to write many interesting and relevant things about the human-environment relationship here in the future.

Environments are in distress all over the world. Sometimes we reverse our environmental damages, as with the ozone layer and many rivers in North America, but overall we are moving toward increasing environmental ruin with global warming, toxic or radioactive landscape contamination, extremely high extinction rates, massive oil spills, and the loss of drinkable water. Most people are somewhat or very concerned about the daily reports they hear about environmental degradation, yet the damage goes on.

Why this discrepancy between our desires and reality? Is our environmental future out of our control?

I hope to address such questions in future posts. Please stay tuned.

Ken