Neighbors from hell

Humans are neighbors from hell. Not only are humans unable to share the planet responsibly with their fellow species, but they are also agents of the planet's imminent destruction.

Such is the claim made by Elizabeth Kolbert in her new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. 

An asteroid collided with the earth and dinosaurs perished 61 million geological years ago. That was the fifth extinction the planet had suffered.

The agent of the planet's sixth extinction is man himself. 

The sixth extinction isn't one large mass extinction of a species in a single fell swoop. It's an ongoing series of extinctions of several crucial species, crucial for the maintenance of the earth's ecological integrity, that would add up to reach a tipping point of a grand scale of irrevocable demise of the planet's environment.

Hurricane Sandy is said to have had a more damaging impact on New York City because of the erosion of oyster beds from the shore lines of Greater New York. In an epiphanic piece, Paul Greenberg attributes the erosion to "400 years of poor behavior on the part of humans." 

Humans have chipped away steadily at the planet's ecological integrity over time. 

Kolbert scalds our "hegemonic ideology" of that "exalts short-term thinking and ignores the true long-term cost and consequences of the choices we’re making in industry, energy policy, agriculture, forestry and politics."

Two excellent reviews of the book can be found here and here.

Have cars made us stupid?

In a New york Times Sunday Review piece, A Stroll Around the World, Pulitzer Prize winning writer for the National Geographic Paul Salopek, blasts the motorization of human civilization, especially in the Global North.

Salopek is on a mission to travel the world on foot, as his goal is to stray off the beaten "paved" path taken by motorists and stroll those paths of the globe that human's have ambulated along since the Pleistocene age.

He struggles to put himself in a "Pleistocene state of mind." Such a state of mind is un recuperable with the advent and subsequent hegemony of the car. 

While strolling through Saudi Arabian deserts, Salopek experiences motorists with "car brain" and thinks of how unsuitable a car brain is for navigating the Middle Eastern terrains. Yet not too long ago, the ancestors of the species saddled with car brains were Bedouins, or nomadic strollers who had a different sense of space and time.

Like drivers everywhere, their frame of reference is rectilinear and limited to narrow ribbons of space, axle-wide, that rocket blindly across the land.

One suspects, Salopek would have prefered to meet the Bedouins on the backs of camels instead of Sheiks inside air conditioned cars.

To the placeholder of the car brain, the earth’s surface beyond the pavement was simply a moving tableau — a gauzy, unreal backdrop for his high-speed travel. He was spatially crippled.

Those with car brains, separated from those with plain brains, have an acquisitive attitude to space:

Cocooned inside a bubble of loud noise and a tonnage of steel, members of the internal combustion tribe tend to adopt ownership of all consumable space. They roar too close. They squint with curiosity out of the privacy of their cars as if they themselves were invisible.

Cars are without a doubt the defining artifacts of our civilization, having reshaped our minds in ways that we have stopped thinking about a long time ago, says Salopek.

Cars, Salopek acknowledges are indispensable and have in history built the middle classes. However, they have also severed a natural and limbic connection humans had developed with both the earth and fellow humans that reach back to the basement of time. 

The internal combustion engine has affected more drastic changes on human culture — flattening it through the annihilation of time and space — than the web revolution. Indeed, the century-old automotive revolution prepared the way for the rise of the Internet, by eroding the capacity for attention, for patience, by fomenting a cult of speed.

I wonder what Nicholas Carr would say to the discovery that a flattening of the brain had already been set in motion before we took on the habit of outsourcing our brain's primordial functions of deep thought and memorizing to the Internet.

Cli-Fi

Once upon a time, there was "Chick lit"; then there was "Clit-lit".

Now there is Cli-fi, echoing Sci-fi, WiFi and Hi Fi, words that mean disparate things, but rhyme nonetheless). Cli-fi is a literary term, coined to denote works of fiction that grapple with global climate change.

Polar City Red, by Tulsa-based writer James Laughter, envisions life in the great frozen north, where populations migrate to after global warming has destroyed the earth's ecosystem. 

The hero of Odds Against Tomorrow is a mathematician who specializes in the math of catastrophe--global wars, natural disasters and ecological collapse. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against any future disasters.

The novel is more about cultural fears brought on by the spectres of an apocalypse.

Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior is on global warming and the abysmal failure of public education in enlightening people about this most significant of issues in a scientific and reasonable way.

The name, Cli-fi, maybe new but as the New Yorker writes:

Environmental havoc has flourished in postapocalyptic fiction, where it makes for vivid, frightening atmospherics and, paradoxically, fosters a sense of unreality. In John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, from 1956, a new virus infects grasses across the globe, causing mass famine. The Drowned World, by J. G. Ballard, published in 1962, is set in 2145, after solar radiation has melted the polar ice caps and London has become a tropical swamp. T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, from 2000, is set in a nearly apocalyptic 2025—a hot, food-scarce U.S. that is plagued by mass extinction. Margaret Atwood’s great dystopian trilogy, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and the forthcoming MaddAddam, engages with similar disaster scenarios.

On the bus?

I've heard that in cities like, Oregon, Seattle, and San francisco, people are likely to look funnily at you, if you're not on a bike or on foot and are always in your car, behind the wheels.

All three cities have superb mass-transit as alternative to driving, giving people the option to not drive when they don't want to. 

According to a study published by U.S. Pirg, a non-profit advocacy group, this culture, marked by a preference for biking, walking and availing of mass transit if available, is spreading from out of the ecology-minded Pacific Northwest to other places like Charlotte, North Carolina, among others.

The downshifting in American driving patterns--fewer Millennials, or the "Internet"-generation, care to be enchanted by the prospects of being "in control" behind their wheels, or care to wait impatiently for their licences--is interestingly enough, noticeable most prominently among the highly-educated, affluent youth of America. 

But this tiny demographic also has an outsized pocket, i.e. is a demographic with the cultural and economic power to induce larger shifts in ways of living. So, the projection is that local governments will be pressured into investing more and more money in the building of infrastructure like mass transit and spend less on highways.

Does this mean that America has to produce a suitable epic to match a growing disenchantment with the "road?" 

Remember Jack Kerouac's epic that was symbolical of a traditional American craving--the desire for unbounded freedom experienced on the highways of the nation, inside a car, behind the wheels?

Perhaps, it's time for something like "On the Bus?"

For a fuller appraisal of the phenomenon see here.

Climate Change

Climate change is to the Republican base what leprosy once was to healthy humans — untouchable and unmentionable. Their party is financed by people whose fortunes are dependent upon denying that humans have caused the earth’s weather patterns to change for the worse.

Timothy Egan

The World's Mine Oyster

This was the rascally Piston's quip to Falstaff in Shakespeare's early comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor:

Falstaff:I will not lend thee a penny.
Pistol:
Why then the world's mine oyster,
Which I with sword will open.
Falstaff:
Not a penny.

Pistol's comic threat--that he's going to steal if falstaff doesn't loan him money--has over time become a merely conceited proclamation of opportunity.

But Oysters are not to be trifled with anymore. They can't simply be seen as passive repositories of the mythical pearl.

Oysters, as Paul Greenberg, who writes about environmental issues reminds us, play a vital role in protecting the Tri-State shorelines from the violent incursions like the one we saw from Hurricane Sandy.

Yet the "oyster kingdom" has been depleted over years.

Sans the depletion, the Hudson and the East river would not have made such deep and devastating inroads into the low-lying areas of Manhattan and New Jersey:

Until European colonists arrived, oysters took advantage of the spectacular estuarine algae blooms that resulted from all these nutrients and built themselves a kingdom. Generation after generation of oyster larvae rooted themselves on layers of mature oyster shells for more than 7,000 years until enormous underwater reefs were built up around nearly every shore of greater New York.

 Just as corals protect tropical islands, these oyster beds created undulation and contour on the harbor bottom that broke up wave action before it could pound the shore with its full force. Beds closer to shore clarified the water through their assiduous filtration (a single oyster can filter as much as 50 gallons of water a day); this allowed marsh grasses to grow, which in turn held the shores together with their extensive root structure.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, there is much talk about re-designing the infrastructure in New York City to handle the city's identity as an emergent "Gulf Coast".

But humans have already dismantled the natural infrastructure. Isn't it time for the environment  to become a part of the conversation?