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THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE - PART TWO

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE - PART TWO 08/10/2004 04:07 PM

Second part of a three-part essay. Part One is here. Bibliography of all sources cited is here.

fig 3

To appreciate the truth about nature you need to look at it from outside the frame, the filter through you've been taught to look at everything. In other words, you need to unlearn, or at least forget, what you've learned, been told, and come to understand about nature and about the entire world in which we live. We need to give you a kind of cultural amnesia for awhile. If you're willing, let's see if we can do that.

Most people have a picture of humans at the top of a long, complex evolutionary tree, an inevitability, a pinnacle, a culmination. In fact the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in his book Full House, teaches us that homo sapiens is in evolutionary terms a small, recent and ordinary evolution, a small part of a small and undistinguished (if you study variations in our DNA) branch of the tree of life. He also teaches us that evolution is not about 'up' at all, but rather a constant series of experiments, variations, random walks from what has succeeded, as nature's method of ensuring the resiliency of life on Earth by checking to see if this minor variation might be a bit hardier in this ecosystem, that minor variation in that ecosystem etc. Most of these variations fail, but quite a few succeed, so to the outside observer all life on Earth, and perhaps on every planet, appears to be a single living organism that takes root, flowers, grows to occupy as much space as the climate will permit, and then continues to change in a balance, an equilibrium, responding to climate change and introducing new random variations in an eternal quest to find forms that are best suited to survive in the little place in space where it happened to land. Gould's lessons are:

Darwinian selection, this 'random walk' of evolution in which new variations are constantly introduced and tried out to see if they're better suited to the local ecosystem, tends to favour, for short periods, new species that are bigger, fiercer, and smarter than those currently prevailing. By 'fiercer' Gould means species that have the ability and tendency to catch and eat a lot of prey. By 'smarter' he means species that can discover how to use tools to supplement the natural tools evolution endowed them with. For brief periods, these bigger, fiercer, smarter creatures squeeze out the rest, decreasing biodiversity and biocomplexity. The result is temporary fragility of the ecosystem to the point the dominant creatures begin to destroy the system's ability to support other life, including its own prey. The dominant creatures then find themselves overcrowded, short of food, and/or vulnerable to opportunistic diseases, as shown in the chart above. The consequent decline in numbers of the dominant species removes the stress so ecological equilibrium is gradually restored, biodiversity and biocomplexity again explode, and the system thrives in ever-shifting balance until the next big, fierce, smart creature evolves. These cycles of evolutionary change and re-balance occur constantly at the local level, and sometimes, when the re-balancing forces take longer to emerge, at a regional or global level. So natural selection paradoxically favours short-term prosperity of creatures that, in the longer run, could be detrimental or even catastrophic to the ecosystem as a whole. In any laboratory with trillions of experiments going on constantly, some of them will get temporarily out of control. In these cases, nature has to bring in the big fire extinguishers -- epidemic disease, cannibalism and war -- to restore the balance quickly, and the result, which fortunately is rare, is called an Extinction Event. These events, which punctuate the history of our planet, are described in Michael Boulter's book Extinction.
In some cases, drastic changes in the ecosystem can also precipitate Extinction Events. Most scientists believe that the last two major Extinction Events were caused by massive volcanic eruptions and by a meteor impact. Both occurrences blocked out the sun with dust particles and prevented photosynthesis, and the latter of these caused the premature extinction of the dinosaurs. Much more recently, another meteor impact may have caused Earth to wobble on its axis, producing drastic and sudden climate change and the Ice Ages and causing a series of lesser Extinction Events. The resultant loss of prey may have led to the decision of homo sapiens, up until then a hunter-gatherer for three million years, to try out an agricultural culture, the culture which currently dominates the planet and ironically threatens to bring about the next Extinction Event prematurely.
After the next major Extinction Event, whenever it occurs, Gould argues that the new evolutionary cycle will produce species that are so different from us as to be unimaginable: The probability of vertebrates (which most larger Earth creatures and all Sci-Fi aliens improbably are) emerging from any primordial soup is infinitesimally small. But whatever it looks like (if it's even 'visible' or otherwise discernible by our species), if it's big, fierce and smart it is likely to exterminate itself before it visits us in UFOs, or vice versa. So hoping for aliens to rescue us from our cloddishness, or hoping to find a new habitable world before our time runs out, or hoping to find answers in SETI, are all just foolish wastes of time and energy. We're in this all alone, and there's no deus in this machina, no matter how much we pray for one.

Gould's theories have earned him the enmity not only of creationists and the religious right (for obvious reasons) but also of other evolutionists who would like to believe evolution and the dominance of the human species is a progression with perhaps some deeper purpose, result or guiding hand. This view of all life on Earth as a single, self-regulating organism is called the Gaia Hypothesis, so named by James Lovelock. Unlike the previously prevailing view of most scientists, and historians, that life on Earth is a constant, violent, competitive struggle, this hypothesis sees life on Earth as a cooperative undertaking for mutual advantage. Earth as a single organism, Lovelock argues, is analogous to the human body -- the constituent parts work together to make the whole successful, rather than constantly warring with each other for dominance and space.

In fact prehistoric man's life was not, as we have been led to believe, "short, nasty and brutish", but idyllic and leisurely, for three million years, argue revisionist economist-historians Peter Jay, in his book The Wealth of Man, and Marshall Sahlins, in his book Original Affluence. Jay's timeline parallels that of Gould: When, 60 million years ago a meteorite plunged the planet into darkness and exterminated the dinosaurs, smaller species got the chance to evolve and thrive, spawning on Earth an enormous and interconnected diversity of life in dynamic equilibrium. That amazing, Utopian heterogeneity continued until about 30,000 years ago (an infinitesimally small flicker of time before now) when the population of homo sapiens suddenly exploded. Until that time, according to Jay, early humans probably lived an Eden-like existence, easily preying on large, slow and abundant fellow mammals in all corners of Earth, and 'working' only a few hours per week. As these species became extinct (aided perhaps by the Ice Ages and by the increasing sophistication of our hunting tools), we turned to new technologies, most notably agriculture and animal herding, to feed our exploding numbers, which rose from 6 million ten thousand years ago to 60 million three thousand years ago to 600 million five hundred years ago and to 6 billion today. Each ten-fold increase from our 'natural' six million population (which prevailed for the first 99% of human history on Earth) increased the effort each individual had to make to sustain his family, competition for land and resources, and in turn cycles of war, famine and epidemic disease. In the process, our resourcefulness led us to industrialize and urbanize to improve productivity, and, more recently, to so horribly foul our environment that its ability to support non-human life is quickly vanishing, due to stress from global warming, exhaustion of arable land, fisheries and forests, desertification, overpopulation, shrinking of the water table, and a host of other man-made threats. Jay is a pessimist about the competitiveness that our civilization has inspired, believing that we are unlikely to ever put the collective interest of all life on Earth ahead of our individual interests in the face of ever-exploding population and growing scarcity.

So we live now on a world where two systems coexist uncomfortably with each other: The 600 million year old natural system of biodiversity, experimental evolution, and continuous re-balancing, punctuated by Extinction Events, and the 30 thousand year old man-made system of continuous growth, expansion, internal competition, and innovative technologies. We'll look at the man-made system later. For now, let's go back and try to understand the natural system.

fig 1

Imagine that you, and a small group of other people, were to wake up tomorrow with absolutely no memories of your past or even of the language you spoke, in the middle of a forest in a tropical wilderness. Even if none of you had ever spent a moment away from the shelter of civilization in your life, you would not awake and be filled with dread and fear. You think you might because in the 'real' world you have been conditioned to fear nature, to see it as savage, violent, a struggle to survive. You have been taught, brainwashed, to distrust and ignore your instincts. But now you would awaken with no such prejudgements. You would become, in many ways, as children, and your whole group would awake full of wonder, and greet each other awkwardly, and then, probably, until hunger and thirst and sexual desire started to command your attention, you would probably play with your new 'friends', exploring and discovering, as children do, and as the newborn of all species in nature do. Imagine, too, that there is an unseen force that, for a while, protects you -- pulls you away before you can touch plants that are poisonous, guides you to safe, comfortable places to sleep, eat, drink and play, and repels predators, until you have learned from this force -- let's say you call it ma -- how to survive without its intervention, at which point ma leaves you to your own devices. Your group becomes, in fact, a hunter-gatherer tribe, completely unaware of any of the precepts of civilization -- language, science, reason, morality. Your initial state is one of astonishing joy, wonder, health, well-being, self-sufficiency, peace, security, community, learning, alertness, awareness, cooperation, imagination, love and respect for nature, and, to the extent needed, creativity -- all the elements of natural systems shown in the diagram above. You will instinctively hunt together and gather and share food, and you will recognize in each other specialized talents for doing one thing or another, and learn from your expert peers. There will be a 'pecking order' of sorts, based on consensus of, and respect for, those whose talents are most valuable -- keen senses, physical strength, creativity -- but the tribe will be egalitarian. There will be no hoarding or inequitable distribution of food or other resources. Since there is no scarcity, sharing will be according to need. Sex will be consensual and non-exclusive. Some members of the tribe will be eaten by predators, and others will contract diseases and go off by themselves to die, but these deaths will not cause the members of the tribe to become fearful, paranoid, selfish, greedy or violent. They will simply be accepted as the way life is. Your tribe of amnesiacs will know of no other way to respond. You will respect and flee from predators, and be alert for them and protect your young from them, but you will not fear them.

That is how nature works. Each creature strives to live and to bring more of their kind into the world not because they fear death, but because life is wonderful. When you see tiny birds scrounging at your bird-feeder or shivering in a tree in winter, don't feel sorry for them. They are not helpless and struggling and cowed. They shiver because instinctively they know it keeps their body temperature up. They have amazing (at least to us, who lack them) instinctive survival talents -- they need a lot of food in winter to keep warm, and they find it easily, enjoyably, and if they can't, they simply hibernate, and if they even suspect they won't be able to, they'll migrate. They can fly, and I envy them, I wish I were one of them. Although lots of birds are eaten by predators, few freeze or starve to death -- famine is a modern human invention, due to our huge numbers and loss of natural adaptability. If you see a dead bird, it almost certainly succumbed to one of three human-caused injuries: Collision with a window, or an automobile, or a domestic cat that no longer needed or wanted to eat what it killed.

The people in your amnesiac tribe, and all the creatures in the wild, know what David Abram calls the Spell of the Sensuous. Many animals have senses that are much more acute than ours, and we have lost much of our sensory acuity and openness, largely because we live most of our lives in cities and indoors, areas of great sensory homogeneity, poverty and concealment. We no longer have either rich sensory environments to experience, or practice exercising our senses, opportunities to open ourselves up to the richness of sounds, sights, smells, tastes and feelings in nature, so that even in those rare times when we are in natural environments we are unaware, insensitive, closed, disinterested in their magic, their meaning, their knowledge.

Our ignorance of nature, combined with our collective arrogance (because of our unquestioned evolutionary success), leads us to believe that we are the only sentient, emotional, intelligent creatures on the planet, and to tell ourselves that all other life couldn't possibly have done so well for so many millions of years because they're smart, sensitive and creative, so it must be because they're automatons just doing what they've been 'programmed' to do. But just as economists and historians are tearing apart our myths about prehistoric man, scientists are systematically deconstructing the anthropocentric myths of our emotional and intellectual uniqueness and superiority. Although our incompetence at deciphering animal language and communications has so far made it conveniently impossible to prove conclusively, there is very compelling evidence that many animals exhibit extraordinary intelligence, great awareness of their own existence, and profound emotion.

Jeff Masson's work on the emotional life of animals, most notably a book called When Elephants Weep, supports this theory. As an environmentalist, and a caretaker and observer of cats and dogs throughout my life, I had always believed that other animals were almost as sentient as humans, and that our bigger brains had led us to be different in degree from other animals, but not unique or fundamentally different. Until I read Masson I was a bit embarrassed about, and unsure of, this belief, since it seemed romantic and impossible to substantiate. Masson's extremely scientific, thorough and well-substantiated work not only dispelled my embarrassment, it hardened my position against those who, as apologists for animal testing and pathetically weak animal-cruelty laws, label animal rights as being anthropomorphic and hence absurd. They do so in total, convenient and deliberate denial of overwhelming scientific evidence that animals are sentient, intelligent and capable of deep emotion, long-lasting memory and astute reasoning.

I have since read other works that ascribe similar intelligence and emotional sensitivity to primates learning sign language, wolves, whales and dolphins, ravens and other corvid birds (Bernd Heinrich's book Mind of the Raven is especially persuasive and hugely entertaining). At this point I do not know to what to ascribe continuing human ignorance and inaction to improve the lot of our fellow animal creatures on this planet. When I hear arguments that "we need to solve the problems of humans first" or that "you can't equate the life of an animal with a human life" I am incredulous -- such thinking is beyond ignorance and to me represents a deep-seated fear and hatred of all things natural (which to me, since we are part of 'all things natural' is a form of self-loathing). Or it represents a blind acceptance of religious dogma. Whichever it is, I can't fathom such a position. I know that, like all species, we are slow to change our thinking and beliefs, but I can only hope that, with people like Masson and Heinrich systematically debunking the myths about our fellow creatures in solid scientific ways, we will at least move to reduce animal cruelty and begin to try to understand what other animals have to teach us, and to say to us.

In fact given some new evidence that emotion is principally a response to sensory stimulus, and knowledge that some animals have greater sensitivity to many sensory stimuli than humans, it's quite possible that many animals lead much richer emotional lives than we do, that they are more 'sensitive' in every sense of the word than we are, that they 'feel' more, and more deeply, than we could ever hope to. Why then don't they articulate this, so that we understand? Perhaps they do -- maybe we are just so numb to all language other than our limited and clumsy human ones that we don't 'hear' them. Or perhaps it's just that they don't have to -- maybe we developed 'sophisticated' abstract language not because we were uniquely able to, but because it was necessary to convey precise instructions about man-made processes (like harvesting crops) in our strange new unnatural hierarchical culture, whereas other animals always survived just fine without such artificial constructs. How sophisticated a language do you need to say "danger", "food", "yes", "no", and "I love you", and ultimately what else is really important to say? I'm being facetious of course -- humans now need our language and our technology to live comfortable lives. But most other animals know a better way to live, and don't need sophisticated language or technology to do so.

Another truth about nature is the importance of community and of place. Civilization has supplanted our sense of community -- the essential unit of social life for all other creatures and cultures on Earth -- with constructs that allow greater command and control over all civilized humans and all human endeavour: The family, the corporation, the religious order and the state. The family is a small, nuclear social unit that is undemocratic (the power is unequally distributed) and helpless (it can't survive without interacting with larger social groups). The corporation, the religious order and the state are large, hierarchical social units that are undemocratic (the power is unequally distributed) and omnipotent. By giving the adult (usually the father) the power in the family unit, corporations, religious orders and states are able to lower social resistance to keeping the real power for themselves, which is essential to maintaining order in a world of six billion people who intuitively want to self-govern. The community competes for allegiance and authority with the family on one side, and with the corporation, the religious order, and the state on the other, so it has been systematically attacked and subverted from both sides. When we say we live in a 'community' today, it doesn't mean a group of people with whom we have special kinship (unless we are exceptionally lucky), it means the homogeneous yet unintegrated collection of nuclear family homes that is part of a larger, powerful state. This community has no real power, no real authority, and no real organization, and commands no allegiance from those who live in it, who cannot even really be called 'members'. We are, however, members of a family, and members as well of a state (citizens), religious order and corporation (employees). The place in which we live usually bears no signs of its natural heritage (trees are cut down and non-native trees and flowers planted in their place, and all houses look much like houses everywhere else in the civilized world, and block the view of everything except the neighbouring houses). And many of us live transient lives -- we move often to other, identical-looking places far away, and during the day we commute from our 'homes' on identical-looking highways to identical-looking office buildings and plants. So we have no sense of community, no sense of place, and no loyalty to either.

In the natural world, community and place are paramount. The community is democratic, self-managing and self-selecting: Even if you are born into it, either you have to pass a rite of passage to stay (with the approval of other community members) or you are expected to leave and find another community (or form your own). You belong to a community -- a much stronger bond than mere membership. The community (like the amnesiac tribe described earlier) teaches you what you need to live, defines you and gives you purpose. It anchors and connects you. And though we are all part of a web, a mosaic, and we all travel, ultimately we have our own place, our 'home'. If you're not totally connected with everything and every creature that is part of your place, then it isn't your place. If you don't have a place, then you don't yet really exist. It is your community, your ecosystem, all of it, that is your place -- not the isolated, nuclear-family, locked house on 'private' property. A house is not a home. And even though most humans live largely inside their own minds, a mind is not a home either, it is not a real place.

Very few of us in the civilized world really belong to a community, or have found our true place, a natural home. In nature, by contrast, every creature either belongs to a community and to a place, or is in a lifelong quest for them. It is instinctive to belong to a community and to a place because in Darwinian terms that is what works best. Even we humans, newcomers to the Earth, have three million years of programming in our DNA driving us to seek community and find our place. And because it works so well it is not surprising that most creatures, human and otherwise, who have found where they belong and found their place are quite passionate about it -- they will defend it from all outsiders of their species, even to the death if necessary (which it rarely is, because except for civilized man, most creatures profoundly respect the communities and places of others, and unless welcomed in will go back or move on). And they will share their space with communities of all other species that also call that place home, because they instinctively understand the reverence of place and community, appreciate the value of diversity, and that all life on Earth is sacred. The love that you have for your place and your community, and the other and diverse lives with which you share it, is what gives your life meaning. There is no 'Tragedy of the Commons' in nature, because of the profound understanding that every place is somebody's home, a part of somebody's community, and must be respected. Land is not merely property to be owned or fenced off by one individual of one species. It is sacred, holy, part of life itself. It 'belongs' to no one. We belong to the land, to the web of life of which it, and we, are all a part.

Now I know how David Abram must have felt writing The Spell of the Sensuous. It's all too hard, maybe impossible, to explain the truth about nature in words and charts and pretty pictures. It's like trying to describe life outside to someone who has lived their whole life in a prison. A prison with no bars or locks but which, astonishingly, no one walks away from. I can't tell you, but nature can show you her truth. But you need to let her. If you live most of your life indoors, in a car, in a city, inside your own mind, it will be hard, like learning a new language when you're old. To understand you will have to:

Spend time with her, in wilderness (not just a park or a cottage or a summer camp)
Open your senses, and re-learn to really see, hear, smell, taste and feel again
Re-learn to trust your instincts: For three million years they showed man the way to live
Find a real community and a place in nature to which, even if only for awhile, you can belong
Silence the noise in your head
Re-learn to imagine what is real, what is really going on that you can't see, and what is possible
Learn to think critically and profoundly beneath the issues and distractions of the day to what really matters
Find the courage to challenge a culture that doesn't make sense to you, to be different, to be fearless, to be genuine, to be yourself, and not like everyone else (rational and moral and superficial and passive)

You don't have to do all these things. If you do a few, even a couple, the others will probably happen naturally. I don't expect many people to understand or buy any of this. The idea that six billion of us are needlessly and voluntarily living profoundly destructive, counter-intuitive, unhappy, unhealthy, unnatural, hard, self-limiting, self-sacrificing, deprived lives, and that all we need to do is learn the lessons of nature, change our minds, walk away from civilization and create an stunningly better, joyful life, and save the world in the process, is just too radical, too insane an idea for most people to accept. Who are we to throw away 30 millennia of civilization and try to build something new based on a three million year old idea? There must be a good reason why the world is the way it is. We're humans, we're the Crown of Creation, if there was a better way to live we'd have found it. We can't change it anyway, we don't have the power, it's not our place. And we're too busy just doing our jobs, just trying to get by. Don't bother us. It's too hard. You're asking too much of us. Go bug someone else.

OK. So don't listen to me. Listen to the quiet, nagging voice inside you. The voice that resonates with your three million year old DNA, that's telling you that something is very wrong, that life should be better, happier, less of a struggle than this.The truth about nature is that she is inside us, all around us, just waiting for us to ask her what to do. And waiting to welcome us all home.

Part Three, the final part of this series next week, will describe how we, civilized man, lost our way, and forgot who we are, establish the sense of urgency for change, explain why continuing to do what we are doing now, no matter how valiantly, will only get us where we are currently headed, and prescribe not solutions but a process for those who are ready, caring and courageous to design and create a better, natural world.

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE - PART THREE

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE - PART THREE 08/19/2004 05:19 PM

Third and final part of a three-part essay. Part One is here. Part Two is here. Bibliography of all sources cited is here.

fig 2

In Part Two I explained what we lost when, thirty thousand years ago, in response to a sudden shortage of big game, we gave up our hunter-gatherer cultures, started the tedious and back-breaking work of agriculture, invented civilization and tried to convince everyone that this strange and unintuitive new society was a good and necessary way to live. Although the 'history' we are taught in school starts with the birth of civilization, and treats everything before that as a non-event, books like Daniel's Quinn's Ishmael and Story of B, Richard Manning's Against the Grain, Derrick Jensen's A Truth Older Than Words and the essays of Jared Diamond have started to develop a credible, broader picture of human history, explaining that the transition of three-million-year-old homo sapiens from hunter-gatherer to farmer-settler was a traumatic one, and led inadvertently to consequences of great suffering and misery and ecological stresses that today imperil the survival of all life on the planet.

This picture looks something like this: We learned that for civilization to work, we had to live closer together, and to work in a coordinated way in new and difficult jobs. To do so we needed to evolve new, abstract, technical languages and create hierarchies of command and control. The crowding, the coercion, and the development of very successful agricultural technologies had three immediate consequences: High levels of physical and emotional stress (nature's way of signalling and dealing with overcrowding), excess food (which in turn led to exploding population, and even more crowding), and, paradoxically, recurring and catastrophic shortages, as the new monoculture crops occasionally and spectacularly failed. Thus the vicious cycle shown in the chart above began.

With more and more people crammed into civilization's new 'cities', opportunistic diseases that required proximity quickly evolved and blossomed into epidemics. The human forms of poxviruses, nature's ubiquitous species-specific population regulator, became endemic and killed over a billion of the first few billion humans born into civilization. The crowding and the loss of community and purpose and place led to mental illness, to new physical ailments (like tooth decay and heart disease) connected to the loss of variety in our diet, and to addictions, which are now so common and widespread that we have come to think of them as normal, and only notice them in the descendants of tribal cultures most recently conquered and forced to adapt to civilization's ways, where their symptoms are most tragic and most obvious. The crowding also produced continuous violence and war, as fighting broke out over increasingly scarce land and resources, and the ethic that had held for three million years that land was sacred, and belonged to the community that was already there, was replaced by an ethic of acquisition, of justifiable genocide of uncivilized cultures, and of manifest destiny to conquer and seize every acre of land to meet civilization's insatiable needs. Catastrophic crop failures led to famines, previously unknown on the planet, and the 'fear of not having enough' caused everyone to try to hoard surpluses, and prompted those higher in the new hierarchies to demand more than their share, and to use their power to establish and preserve a staggering new inequality of health and wealth.

Social order, which for three million years had been egalitarian and instinctive and built around the tribal community, started to break down as the new larger social structures did not work on the same principles. New social principles therefore had to be developed: New religions taught that suffering was normal and divine will; New laws and punishments and prisons were introduced to enforce obedience to the rules set by those at the top of the hierarchy; New educational and moral codes taught that war is honourable and inevitable, that some people deserve more wealth and security than others, and that conformity and other qualities that keep order and discipline are 'virtues'; The nuclear family unit was conceived to promote patriarchy and hierarchy as the natural human order, and to replace the loss of the tribal community. And all of these new systems portrayed nature as dangerous, brutal, something that had to be conquered and subdued in the interest of man, and portrayed man as divine, above and apart from all other life, so that man was absolved from the guilt, the responsibility and the intuitive distress over destroying nature and enslaving the tribal peoples and animals that got in the way of global dominion by 'civilized' man, in his insatiable need for more land, more resources and more slave labour to feed the ever-increasing masses. And man, social, adaptable, gullible creature that he is, bought it all. He learned to forget his true nature, to distrust his instinct, and to believe that civilization, despite its vicious cycle, was the only way to live.

It's only in the last century that the wisdom of this new civilization ethos has been seriously questioned by more than a few eccentric individuals. This century has seen the worst wars, the worst famines, the worst epidemics, the greatest suffering of any century in civilization's brief 300-century history, and the lack of progress has started to lead many to a sense that something is terribly wrong. In The Axemaker's Gift, Burke & Ornstein reveal that human innovativeness, which originally helped man adapt and live better, is now used as a tool to entrench authority and concentrate power. In The Unconscious Civilization John Ralston Saul explains that the political and economic and corporate systems we built to make our lives better have now enslaved us, and are out of our control. In Ockham's Razor, Wade Rowland argues that civilization has dehumanized humans, and that science and technology have accelerated rather than slowed this process in the last millennium.

In People Before Profit, Charles Derber recounts the cautionary tale of the 18th century robber barons and warns that corporatism is once again driving much human activity, in ways that benefit only a tiny elite and impoverish all other life on Earth. In When Corporations Rule the World, David Korten shows how corporations, which we invented to try to improve the production and distribution of resources, have lost sight of their purpose and now control us, while producing ever-greater inequality of wealth. The Worldwatch Institute, in its annual State of the World reports, dispassionately identify the measures of growing ecological collapse. And in The New Rulers of the World, Jon Pilger shows how much control now resides in a tiny number of people -- fewer than a million -- with a vested interest in perpetuating the vicious cycle above.

Richard Manning's Against the Grain explains how grain surpluses were the first human currency, used to bribe some people into beating down others to establish the first human hierarchies, and describes the incredible vulnerability of monoculture agriculture to catastrophic failures that has led to soul-destroying famines, wars, unimaginable suffering, and even cannibalism -- and ultimately to the political systems that perpetrate these disasters and lead to overpopulation, modern concentration-camp style factory farms, and staggering inequality of power and wealth.

As these and other authors paint a disturbing picture of civilization's well-intentioned social, political and economic folly, other writers describe civilization's devastating impact on our psyches. Edward Hall, in The Hidden Dimension, explains the psychological impact of overcrowding as a natural stress reaction common to all animal species. The purpose of this reaction is to induce in creatures that have overpopulated a series of hormonal changes that reduce fertility, increase aggressiveness (to spread them out), and increase susceptibility to disease, and hence quickly bring the population back into ecological balance, as illustrated in the diagram in Part Two. In rare situations when that fails, the hormonal changes kick up another notch, and a social 'blow-up' is produced -- aggressiveness to the point of murder, eating of the young, and adrenal shock leading to premature death ensue. Hall argues that this is precisely what we are witnessing in violent, stressful civilized society. Psychologist Glenn Parton goes further, arguing in The Machine in Our Heads that because we have forgotten how we lived for three million years, lost touch with our instincts, we recognize that something is terribly wrong with the world and feel responsible for it, but no longer see the solution, so the stress ultimately drives us insane.

Meanwhile, the vicious cycle continues to spin out of control. The Census Bureau now predicts that there could well be one billion Americans and fourteen billion humans on the planet by the end of this century, but the corporatist-owned major media continue to pander to the modern myths that population is levelling off quickly, that technology and ingenuity will solve all our problems in plenty of time, and that in fact the West needs more babies to support its ageing population.

Agencies like NOAA and NASA, and scientists like Bill McKibbon (The Overheating World), David Stipp (Climate Collapse) and Kenny Ausubel (The Empire Strikes Out) provide growing evidence that human overpopulation, overdevelopment and overconsumption are not only wiping out most species of life on the planet, but precipitating potentially catastrophic climate change as well. And the creatures that are left, argues JM Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello, are being subjected to cruelty of holocaust proportions.

It is not surprising, in the face of the enormous stresses of civilized life, the incredible unease and guilt we feel about the extinction of all other creatures on the planet, the staggering violence, cruelty and suffering endemic in the culture we created and which is now seemingly out of our control, that we should seek refuge in denial -- denial that Earth is in crisis, denial that the atrocities and suffering are actually occurring, denial that it going to get worse rather than miraculously better thanks to human ingenuity or divine intervention, denial that it is our human responsibility to do anything about it, denial that we can do anything about it, and denial that we have any personal responsibility beyond just doing our best not to contribute to the crisis. And if we're smart enough and informed enough and sensitive enough to be unable to deny this grim reality, we take refuge from the hopelessness and from our helplessness instead by turning it off, by busying ourselves with simpler, more personal, more manageable things. And if we can't do that either we end our own lives. Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

So what are we to do? Some of the writers cited above offer no solutions -- they are merely diagnosticians, they say, it is not their place to tell us what to do. Some writers do proffer answers, that range from the modest to the radical to the resigned. Here are some of them:

The late Freeman Dyson, in his famous Wired interview, suggests we need to rediscover community and focus our attention on it, since that's the political level at which we can have a personal impact. Along with that, he says, we need to quickly advance new technologies that (like solar energy co-ops) increase community self-sufficiency and (like biotech innovations) improve quality of life. Economist Herman Daly, in Developing Ideas, proposes an economic and tax program that would help communities flourish and encourage conservation and the protection of the commons, and proposes a global contract in which developed nations would agree to reduce their levels of consumption while in return the developing nations would agree to reduce their levels of population.

Just in the last year, Jon Schell in The Unconquerable World has proposed a new political system built around non-violence and consensus-building, while Shoshana Zuboff in The Support Economy has proposed a new post-capitalist economic system based on small enterprises collaborating to meet human needs holistically. Thom Hartmann in Unequal Protection, David Korten in When Corporations Rule the World and Joel Bakan in The Corporation present prescriptions for stripping corporations of their power and perhaps returning that power to local communities. Jim Merkel in Radical Simplicity prescribes a way that each of us can strive to reduce our personal footprint to sustainable levels.

Thomas King in The Truth About Stories and Thomas Berry in Dream of the Earth both say we need to write a new story about a new human culture, that the rest of us can embrace, and which will show us the way forward. Meanwhile, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point teaches us how change occurs and can be brought about quickly, and Peter Singer in Ten Ways to Make a Difference and the late Dana Meadows in Places to Intervene in a System offer pragmatic advice about how to bring change about. Stuart Koffman in At Home in the Universe explains how we can exploit the attributes of self-managing systems to help humans evolve at the community level.

While Margaret Mead tells us that most of the major changes in human society and culture have been wrought by a few, caring people, James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds persuades us of the importance and value of tapping into the collective wisdom of large numbers of people who, together, probably have the answer to every problem, even one as intractable as the crisis that faces us today. And Bill McDonough in Cradle to Cradle and Avery Lovins in Natural Capitalism show proven ways that could be used to redesign the world by learning from nature.

Bucky Fuller reminds us that it is much easier to create a new system that renders the old one obsolete than to try to reform an existing system. There is even a school of thought that proposes a human cultural metamorphosis, explained by Elisabet Sahtouris in EarthDance and Gary Alexander in eGaia, by which transformation to a new human culture might be achieved quickly. Glenn Parton in Humans in the Wilderness suggests a grand experiment of spaced-out Intentional Communities, to reintroduce humans to community and wilderness, and provide a model for building a new natural culture.

So there are many suggested solutions, none of which has achieved any great groundswell of support. They are of four main types:

innovative (brought about through invention of new technologies),
social/educational (brought about by virally changing a lot of people's minds),
commercial/entrepreneurial (brought about by changing the rules by which the economy operates) and
political (brought about by changing laws and regulations).

If there is any consensus of these writers, it is that innovation is the easiest way to bring about change ( because it requires no widespread public agreement to occur) and political reform is the hardest (because the political system was set up to institute the changes needed to make civilization 'work' and its very purpose is to defend the status quo).

My answer continues to evolve the more I read, and I'm much less convinced that it's the right answer than I am of the Truth about Nature and the Truth about Civilization. But for those that are interested, here is my answer, as of today:

There are a lot of things that everyone can do, and should do, to make the world better. Here's my latest list of 15 things: Trust your instincts; Listen, learn and teach others; Learn and practice critical thinking; Re-learn how to imagine; Use less stuff; Stop at one child; Become less dependent; Become an activist; Volunteer; Be a role model; Be a pioneer; Find or create a meaningful job; Share your expertise; Be good to yourself; and Infect others with your courage and spirit and passion. It's the least we can do. It's necessary that we do these things to be clearer about what else we need to do, because these things by themselves won't be enough.
There is a second group of things that we need to work on that will require specialized expertise and talent:

Innovators and scientists need to work on simpler, cheaper, more reliable birth control, abortion and assisted-suicide technologies, breakthroughs in clean energy technology, and technologies that: reduce pollution and waste; prevent rather than just treat diseases; reduce the need for transportation; enable community self-sufficiency (e.g. solar/wind energy co-ops, indoor gardening); do more with less; replace molecules with bits; conserve energy and resources; create nutritious and delicious animal-product-free food; reduce the need for agricultural chemicals; enhance the ability of activists and problem-solvers to organize, collaborate virtually and share information; help identify socially and environmentally irresponsible people and corporations; prevent and treat mental illness; and enable us to better communicate with and learn from other animals.
Social activists and teachers need to develop a new non-corporatist, autonomous community-based education system that teaches responsible citizenship, how to learn, how to think creatively and critically, how to get along with others, and how to start and run your own responsible business; they need to persuade people to stop at one child, adopt a vegan diet, buy local and live simpler lives; and they need to teach appreciation of and skills in: community-building, achieving consensus, using citizen-power, effective listening, peaceful conflict resolution; and they need to teach us all how to cope with terrible knowledge, responsibility and change.
Entrepreneurs need to demonstrate and teach community-based Natural Enterprise, and pledge to buy local.
Politicians and lawyers (I'm not holding my breath on this) need to revamp corporate charters to refocus corporations on responsibility to community, end business subsidies, reform election and campaign finance laws, shift taxes from goods (employment) to bads (pollution, waste, non-renewable resource use), replace GDP with a genuine progress indicator, restrict property ownership, protect and expand the commons and wilderness, make health and education universal rights, shift spending from defense to humanitarian activities, forgive third-world debts, reduce extraterritoriality (power of companies and nations over the affairs of other sovereign nations), reinstate usury laws, introduce currency reform and LETS systems, and extend anti-cruelty laws.

We need to quickly reduce human population on Earth to a sustainable level of no more than one billion. Attempting to make any solution work in a world so horrendously overpopulated is futile and insane. If technology improvements, education and peer pressure can achieve this quickly and voluntarily, that would be the best answer. Political pressure to do so has repeatedly failed, and won't work. If the voluntary methods won't work quickly, we need to find another way, painless and non-discriminatory and non-political.
The next culture, everyone seems to agree, needs to be built around communities. We need to create some Model Intentional Communities, a lot of them, to re-learn how communities work, and how to create them, and to show our young people a better way to live (preaching to them won't work). Quinn's idea of just 'walking away' from our civilization culture is a good one, but we need something to walk away to, and MICs might be the answer, the building block of the next, sustainable culture.
Saving the world is going to require some self-sacrifice and some risk-taking. We need to bring together a lot of bright minds in a lot of different ways to start focusing on this one big problem, instead of the immediate little problems civilization keeps throwing in front of us. We need to diagnose and cure the disease, and that means some of us need to stop being preoccupied with treating the symptoms. I believe that process needs to be voluntary, and the problem-solving groups need to be self-selecting and self-managed. And we need to solve the problem holistically -- a vicious cycle can't be changed merely by tinkering with its isolated parts. That means we need a combination of big-picture thinkers and innovators, and specialists who can expose the big-thinkers' ideas to real-world reality tests. Think-tanks, conferences, ad hoc organizations -- we need them all, and lots of them. If we're going to fix this, many people will have to decide to make this their calling, their purpose for living, at considerable personal sacrifice, and they'll have to find, and work with, like minds.
My sense is that the answers, if there are any, are innovations and technologies that can change our culture as broadly and abruptly as the invention of the arrowheads, agriculture, science and automation did. They won't be the result of linear thinking, and will probably be far more revolutionary than any of the technologies I call for in point 2 above. As Einstein said, We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
We don't have much time. We are already starting to see the early signs of total ecological and social collapse, and although this collapse is unlikely to reach a head in our lifetimes (it could take as long as another century), we may already be too late to begin to prevent it. I believe the signal for the beginning of the end will be more conventional than natural disasters caused by global warming -- it is more likely to be a nuclear or biological holocaust caused by two warring, suffering, nothing-left-to-lose nations, or by a stateless group of desperate malcontents who have the motive, and probably the method, and are only now waiting for the opportunity to say fuck you all. There is no time to lose, or to debate whether anything needs to be done. Something needs to be done, now.
We can't go back. Returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is neither possible nor desirable. We need to go forward to build a new culture that understands and learns from the truth about nature, and is sustainable, but which also uses the best innovations and technologies that human ingenuity has and will come up with, so that a billion of us can live lightly on the Earth, comfortably, easily, connected, in balance with and as part of nature. Innovation can allow us to do more with less, to eat well without farming animals or catastrophic agriculture, to specialize in what we do best and love doing most, with people we love to live and work with. But that innovation and those technologies must also respect the truth about nature, which means we'll need to reinvent them to work without non-renewable resources, and so that they can be produced with no pollution and no waste. Just because many current technologies use non-sustainable processes and non-renewable materials, exploit slave labour, are produced by a demeaning hierarchical and irresponsible corporatist economy and produce mountains of toxic garbage doesn't mean all technologies must do so. Just as civilization isn't the only viable human culture, today's wasteful and destructive economy isn't the only viable economy. They're the only life we know, but not the only life possible. We need only imagine something better, and strive to make it so.

My novel, The Only Life We Know, will attempt to take up Thomas King and Thomas Berry's challenge to write a new story for homo sapiens. It is set two centuries in the future, after eco-catastrophe has occurred or been averted, in an idyllic world where man lives in harmony and balance with nature, in a life of comfort, community, respect, responsibility and astonishing diversity. I'm not a scientist, or a powerful teacher, or a politician, or a great debater, or an entrepreneur, or an organizer. My skills are innovation and writing, so what I can best offer to save the world is an imaginative story of what could be, and hope that it might serve as an inspiration for those with other talents to figure out how to get us there, from the terrible and precarious world in which we live today.

Once the book is done, I'd like to start a think-tank, to make respectable the idea of Saving the World as a full-time job, and help those that are informed enough, and committed enough, and courageous enough, and self-sacrificing enough, to start working together on some bold, revolutionary answers. And I'd like to start a Model Intentional Community, and use it as an opportunity to teach young people about nature and Natural Enterprise and critical thinking and creative thinking and a better way to live. And of course I'll continue to do the 15 things listed in point 1 above, which have so transformed me in the three short years since I began this belated journey to try to understand my purpose and my sense of dread about the world we live in.

The truth about nature is that she is inside us, all around us, just waiting for us to ask her what to do. The truth about civilization is that it was an honest mistake, an invention that was necessary at the time, a mere 30,000 years ago, when nature appeared to be letting us down and we thought we could do better. But now it has outlived its usefulness, and is out of control, and threatens the survival of all life on our planet, so it's time to let it go. It's time to move forward and imagine and invent a new culture, a sustainable one that works for all creatures on Earth, drawing on the best learnings from nature and the best innovations from civilization.

It's time to go home.

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE, PART ONE

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE, PART ONE 08/03/2004 06:22 PM

Five years ago, at the age of 48, I decided it was time to stop complaining and being depressed about the state of the world, and start doing something about it. I began to read voraciously, an average of two books a week, and gradually put together a picture in my own mind of the current state of the world, how we got here, and what we needed to do about it. In February of last year I started a weblog, in part because I wanted to share what I had learned, and in part to discuss it with others and find out if they felt the same way that I did. At that time I wrote an essay that described my learning journey to that point. Since then, I have read a great deal more, and engaged a lot of very bright and perceptive people in discussion of these issues. I intended to update the essay, but I have come to realize that the sequential story of discovering the unprecedented crisis this world is in today is essentially what the 'environmental philosophy' category of my weblog tells already. What is needed now instead is a recapitulation, much shorter and not necessarily in the order in which I learned it, of what I have learned and what I believe we need to do to stave off ecological catastrophe. That is what this essay is about.

It is my way of 'signing on' to the 1992 World Scientists' Warning to Humanity signed by 1600 senior scientists from 71 countries, which stated:

"Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated."

At the root of my environmental philosophy is a growing belief that just having everyone 'do their best' to make the world a better place will not be enough. In other words, we need to bring about a dramatic change in our world in this century, a much greater and faster change than any culture can achieve organically. A change this drastic and this sudden has occurred four times before in human history:

about 30,000 years ago, with the invention of the axe, the flint arrowhead and the spear
about 10,000 years ago, with the invention of catastrophic agriculture and animal domestication
during the Renaissance, with the invention of modern science
during the industrial revolution, with the invention of automation

Each of these revolutionary inventions utterly changed the way humans lived. None of them, I think importantly, came about because of political or social actions or revolutions -- they were all (in the broad sense of the term) technology-based. What we need urgently today is another such revolution, every bit as radical as these four. We need to find, and rapidly implement, a better, sustainable way to live.

This essay is organized around ten 'arguments'. I am not smart enough to be able to distill the entire logic supporting these arguments into this essay, but I will refer the reader to sources that do. The Bibliograph y at the end of this essay contains the full list of these sources. Some of the books and articles in this Bibliography contradict each other in places. I freely admit to being selective in what I've taken from each. I trust my instincts in that selection. My purpose is not to persuade you, dear reader, but merely to show you what persuaded me.

The essay also contains a systems chart of 'How Nature Works' and another of 'Why Civilization Doesn't'. These charts are my attempt to capture the interrelationship of the forces that allowed the world to function as a self-managed system so effectively for millions of years, including the first three million years after the appearance of man, and the forces that have largely replaced these natural forces since the dawn of civilization, driven largely by the changes wrought by the four human revolutions noted above.

Here are the ten Arguments:

The Truth About Nature: What We Have Forgotten

Man is not Special, not the Crown of Creation, or a Species Apart, but rather a fairly minor evolutionary adaptation to one ordinary branch of the tree of life on Earth. The impact and 'success' of this species is no more an indication of greater importance, predestination or divine will than is the impact and success of the mosquito, HIV, bacteria, cancer cells or the Plague.
Our planet is a single self-managing organism. All life on Earth exists to sustain, nourish and support all other life on Earth. As with a human body or any other organism, that is only possible when each component of the organism does its part, in balance and harmony with the rest. In that sense the Earth is sacred, it demands and earns respect and obedience to its 'laws' because that is essential to the survival of all life.
The Earth is full of sentient, intelligent, communicative, emotional creatures. Most human moralities and religions seem to hold that creatures with these attributes deserve freedom from harrassment, suffering and enslavement, and the right to exist. Therefore much human activity, which deprives all non-humans of these rights and freedoms, is an atrocity no less despicable than human genocide, holocaust, torture and slavery, and must be stopped.
Small is beautiful, and place gives us identity: The community as the basic political unit and Natural Enterprise as the basic economic unit work best because they can be self-selecting and self-managing, and are extremely adaptive. In nature, the community teaches you what you need to live, it defines you and gives you purpose, it anchors and connects you. And though we are all part of a web, a mosaic, and we all travel, ultimately we have our own place, our 'home'. If you're not totally connected with everything and every creature that is part of your place, then it isn't your place. If you don't have a place, then you don't yet really exist. It is your community, your ecosystem, all of it, that is your place -- not the isolated, nuclear-family, locked house on 'private' property. Larger political units (states) and economic units (corporations) are inherently unwieldy, inflexible and less democratic. Because of their sheer size they are detached, remote, and cannot possibly understand or respond to our needs. Forged from both idealism and cynical greed for power, these abominations serve no useful purpose except to protect us from other large political and economic units (and they do that poorly).
We learn what we're shown, not what we're told. Our senses provide us what we need to learn, to really understand, to be happy. When we live in our minds, we close ourselves off from so much. Formal education is futile. To bring about change we need to show people something that works better, and reconnect them with their senses, their imagination, the Earth.

The Truth About Civilization: The Problem and Its Root Cause

Civilization was a well-intentioned response to a sudden drastic shortage of human food (possibly arising from overhunting of large game and/or the last ice age). But it was not an instinctive way to live, and needed a lot of artificial constructs and controls to work. Our civilization systematically brainwashes us into staggering cultural homogeneity and imaginative poverty, and to believe ours is the only way to live -- that there is no other human way. To do so it must get us to forget or deny the 5 truths above, and teach us these great myths:

That our instincts are unreliable (what nature 'tells' us to do), and logic and morality are infallible (what human codes tell us to do);
That life is a struggle of 'good vs. evil', and that we are inherently weak, selfish and lazy;
That it's good to be 'normal' and to be like other people, and that we're all part of society and not ultimately, terribly alone;
That we must be unconditionally obedient to our 'superiors', their hierarchy and their laws, or society and order will collapse;
That our well-being is appropriately measured by our material possessions and our ability to acquire more;
That disparity of wealth, health and dignity is necessary and inevitable and that with hard work 'have-nots' can become 'haves';
That we must all work long, hard hours at unsatisfying jobs or we will all suffer and starve;
That humans have an inherent right to all the land and all the resources of Earth (and even beyond);
That history began with civilization, before which life was short, fearful, nasty and brutish (and in nature and tribal cultures, it still is).

We are instinctively responsive to, and responsible for, everything we have control over. In nature that is the immediate community -- what goes on outside is not one's business. But now that we, as a 'global community' control the whole world we cannot respond, cannot bear the commensurate responsibility. This conflict between our instincts and reality, along with the stress of overpopulation and separation from nature, has made us all mentally ill. This illness manifests itself in violence and war, hatred, abuse, greed, jealousy, and fear. We are helpless to do what we 'know' we must. It is like facing 'Sophie's choice' (being asked by the Gestapo to decide which of your children to spare from the gas chamber) over and over and over. We cannot bear to know, so we turn off, we hide inside, we distract ourselves. It is only when we don't know, and cannot even imagine, that we can go on, and tolerate the world we have created. This makes it easier for us to accept the brainwashing that ours is the only way to live, to tolerate the abuses and outrages that weknow are going on behind closed doors, and to accept the arguments of skeptics and apologists and holocaust denyers that it's not really that bad, or perhaps it's even good, or at least it's divine will so it's beyond our control, there's nothing we can do about it, we're not really responsible
As a consequence, we are poised, by the end of this century, to create a world that contains one billion Americans and fourteen billion people, and uses eight Earths worth of resources (at current regeneration rates) just to meet human needs. A world that will, as a direct consequence of this overcrowding and unsustainable consumption, be preoccupied with catastrophic famines, epidemic (new) human diseases, crop failures, cannibalism, crop failures, nuclear and biological wars, water rationing and desertification, economic depression, catastrophic terrorism, cascading weather disasters, and the decline of democracy, constitutional liberalism, and the rule of law. A world, arguably, not worth living in.

Forward Not Back: The Solution Process

Solutions are needed that either directly address overpopulation and unsustainable consumption, or address the causes of these problems (see the Why Civilization Doesn't Work chart). Or, alternatively, we could resign ourselves to the inevitable crash of this horrible world (probably as a result of a new catastrophic disease or nuclear or biological holocaust), and start designing a post-apocalypse world that will allow the survivors to carry on and perhaps learn from our mistakes. Solutions, throughout history, have come in four 'flavours': innovative (new technologies), social (changing people's minds), commercial (changing the economy) and political (changing laws and regulations). Innovations have been, throughout human history, by far the most effective and enduring. Revolutionary change requires radical solutions -- solutions that undermine, replace and ultimately destroy existing systems, technologies, ideas and beliefs. But they must represent bold steps forward, not nostalgic steps back to a pre-civilization world that is no longer possible or desirable.
If we hope to impose change on a world unready and unable to save itself, enough of us must be informed, aware of the consequences of our actions, skeptical, willing and able to learn from nature, fully committed, confident we can do it, passionate in our search for radical solutions and courageous in following through on them.

Next Week: Part Two of this essay will support and elaborate on the first 5 arguments, and show that the answers to today's problems are right in front of us -- we need only relearn what we have forgotten and open ourselves to the truths we can no longer see.

Week of August 16th: Part Three will conclude the essay by establishing the sense of urgency for change, explaining why continuing to do what we are doing now, no matter how valiantly, will only get us where we are currently headed, and prescribe not solutions but a process for those who are ready, caring and courageous to find and then implement creative solutions.

VEIL OF
TRUTH

VEIL OF
TRUTH 09/01/2004 03:45 PM

In February, the BBC World Service broadcast a radio program called "Looking for God at Les Minguettes" The 30-minute special features an interview with a young Muslim woman, Sami Hamaclouf, of Algerian ancestry but born and raised in Lyon, France, who, against the wishes of her agnostic parents, adopted the Islamic religion at the age of thirteen. She is now caught in the firestorm in France over the banning of headscarves, like the ones pictured at right, in schools, a ban vehemently supported by President Jacques Chiraq.

Sami has been repeatedly lectured by her school principals who say her costume reflects the subjugation of women, and is repugnant and intolerable in a country like France that prides itself on its égalité. Ironically, the young lady (she is now 22), immersed in French history and the classical teachings of Islam, not the isolated and restrictive variants of fundamentalist regions, is a staunch supporter of equal rights and opportunity for women.

But now, she explains in flawless French, women who want to wear scarves will be forced into private Islamic schools, and will lose the opportunity to teach non-Muslim French people what her peace-loving religion is all about. It would be like schools banning the wearing of a crucifix because that sysmbol was associated with the cross-burnings of the KKK. But because we don't know enough about Islam, most Westerners strongly support the ban on religious adornments in schools, equating the headscarf with the dreaded, and dreadful burka and chador.

No amount of misunderstanding and intolerance, however, would make Sami into a religious extremist. She is 100% French, and loves the country she calls home and its fashion-conscious, liberal culture. She just wants people to understand that extremists do not represent her, or any, religion, and that one's choice of clothing doesn't always mean what we might assume from first impressions.

I've been fighting fashion Nazis all of my life, and I confess that I am revolted at the sight of a woman in a burka or chador, as I am when I see a woman walking behind her husband, or being publicly berated or otherwise humiliated by any man. Yet I have learned to accept headscarves, flowing beards, bizarre tattoos, depressing black robes, beanies, nose rings, saris, shaved heads, and a host of other religious and ethnic attire visible everyday in cosmopolitan Toronto. It is hard to know where to draw the line, how to differentiate a sartorial statement of personal belief or uniqueness from one of repression or brainwashing by others. Don't judge a book by its cover, we're told.

What do you think?

The program will be rebroadcast tomorrow, Thursday at 7:30pm ET on the CBC Radio One program Connections, and should be accessible live over the Internet at that time (though the live broadcast link doesn't seem to work with Mozilla browsers). I cannot find a sound file or text transcript of the program online.

FOUR STORIES
THE MEDIA MOSTLY MISSED

FOUR STORIES
THE MEDIA MOSTLY MISSED 01/23/2004 02:19 PM

Some interesting stories this week, that, for the most part, escaped major media attention. They're all about complex issues with long-term implications, so maybe the big media didn't want us worrying our pretty little heads about them.

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Republicans break into private Democrat databases, use and leak what they find for partisan purposes:

First up, via Atrios, another Bush Republican scandal, this one very reminiscent of Watergate. What these clowns, including Novak, did, is completely illegal, and they should all be in prison. Here's the lead from the Boston Globe, with a link to the full story:

Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.

From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.

The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November. [More]

Canadian sues Ashcroft & Ridge for knowingly & illegally sending him to Syria for torture sessions:

The US Torture Victim Protection Act, ironically passed by Bush I to extend Americans' ability to sue for torture overseas, makes illegal the practice of 'extraordinary rendition' -- the practice of using other countries to extract information through torture and other methods illegal in the US. Maher Arar, who was intercepted at an airport stopover on his way home to Canada from vacation, deported by US authorities without evidence, due process, or notification of Canadian authorities, and then tortured by Syrians for over a year before being released without charge, wants to prevent others from being subject to extraordinary rendition. In his case, Arar makes it clear his release was a Syrian screw-up -- he was supposed to 'disappear' in Syria's prison system to keep his case from coming to light. The second irony is that, although never charged with anything, he's banned from entering the US for five years so he can't testify personally in the case. Sixty Minutes has covered the story but the US print media have hardly mentioned it. [Full Story]

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Senior CIA advisors tell Bush of high probability of Iraq degenerating into civil war

I've only made two major predictions on this blog and this was one of them -- that regardless of what Bush tries to do to 'impose' order, democracy and constitutional liberalism on Iraq (and Afghanistan), the people of those countries will determine their own future on their own terms and in their own time -- and that will inevitably be by way of further bloodshed, totalitarianism and civil strife. It's encouraging to see that someone in a position to get Bush's attention is saying the same thing. Not that he's likely to listen. Here's the lead from Knight-Ridder, picked up by Common Dreams and not many others:

CIA officers in Iraq are warning that the country may be on a path to civil war, current and former U.S. officials said Wednesday, starkly contradicting the upbeat assessment that President Bush gave in his State of the Union address. The CIA officers' bleak assessment was delivered verbally to Washington this week, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the classified information involved.

The warning echoed growing fears that Iraq's Shiite majority, which has until now grudgingly accepted the U.S. occupation, could turn to violence if its demands for direct elections are spurned. Meanwhile, Iraq's Kurdish minority is pressing its demand for autonomy and shares of oil revenue.

"Both the Shiites and the Kurds think that now's their time," said one intelligence officer. "They think that if they don't get what they want now, they'll probably never get it. Both of them feel they've been betrayed by the United States before."

These dire scenarios were discussed at meetings this week by Bush, his top national security aides and the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said a senior administration official, who requested anonymity. Another senior official said the concerns over a possible civil war weren't confined to the CIA but are "broadly held within the government," including by regional experts at the State Department and National Security Council. [Full Story]

Photo above: Tens of thousands of Shiites demonstrate in Baghdad for an end to foreign occupation

Oh, and my other major prediction? That the crushing Bush debt will plunge the world into economic collapse. The IMF are my strange bedfellows on that one. It's going to be a fun year.

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Environmental groups grapple internally with the explosive issue of population -- and immigration

Last but not least, a story from the LA Times about how environmental groups like the Sierra Club are waking up to the terrifying prospect of One Billion Americans, with the consequence of coast-to-coast sprawl, eco-catastrophe and zero green space. The debate pits two core liberal values: environmentalism and openness to immigration, head-to-head. The result, not surprisingly, is a headache. The discussion is long overdue and important. The LA Times did a great job on this story, and since it's passed into the archives, I'm posting it, courtesy of the Ecological Weblog, in its entirety:

An unusual alliance of anti-immigration advocates and animal rights activists is attempting to take over the leadership of the Sierra Club, America's oldest national environmental group, in what is emerging as a bitter fight over the future of the 112-year-old organization founded by Scottish immigrant John Muir. Leaders of a faction that failed to persuade the club to take a stand against immigration in 1998 are seeking to win majority control of the group's 15-member governing board in a spring election -- this time, as part of a broader coalition that includes vegetarians, who want the club to denounce hunting, fishing and raising animals for human consumption.

In response, 11 former Sierra Club presidents have written a letter expressing "extreme concern for the continuing viability of the club," protesting what they see as a concerted effort by outside organizations to hijack the mainstream conservationist group and its $95-million annual budget. Some of the insurgent candidates vying for the five available seats on the governing board only recently joined the Sierra Club. If they win, they will control eight of the 15 seats. Members will vote in the board elections in March, with the results tallied in April. People who join the club by the end of January should be able to vote.

The election has attracted the interest of anti-immigration groups, which are encouraging their members to join the club to help elect the insurgent candidates. "What has outraged Sierra Club leaders is that external organizations would attempt to interfere and manipulate our election to advance their own agendas," said Robert Cox, a past Sierra Club president. Moreover, club officials argue that members of the two insurgent groups share fundamentally anti-human views, in their opposition to immigration and in their belief that people should take a backseat to other species.

The Sierra Club's "dominant perspective has been to protect nature for people," said Executive Director Carl Pope. "But by pulling up the gangplank on immigration, they are tapping into a strand of misanthropy that says human beings are a problem." Pope noted that 18% of Sierra Club members like to fish or hunt, and he worried they could be driven out by the new agenda from animal-rights advocates. "It's important to have hunters and fishermen in the Sierra Club," Pope said. "We are a big-tent organization. We want the Sierra Club to be a comfortable place for Americans who want clean air, clean water, and to protect America's open spaces."

The list of insurgent candidates features some high-profile names, including former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, Cornell University entomology professor David Pimentel, and Frank Morris, former director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. All three have been outspoken advocates of controlling population growth or restricting immigration. Lamm is coauthor of "The Immigration Time Bomb: The Fragmenting of America."

Club officials say the campaign got underway quietly with the recent election of three activists, including UCLA astronomy professor Benjamin Zuckerman, a longtime champion of curbs on immigration; and Paul Watson, head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a marine environmental group perhaps best-known for ramming whaling ships. During their campaigns, the candidates downplayed the views they are now advancing.

Club members who support the insurgent candidates accused the organization's old guard of trying to demonize them as radicals to head off the increasingly popular efforts to win a new majority. "I really think we ought to be judged on our merits and what we've done in the past, and not divide the Sierra Club," Pimentel said.

Political squabbles are hardly new to the 750,000-member Sierra Club, whose members squared off just last year over whether to take a stand against the war in Iraq. But the dispute over this spring's elections is becoming especially rancorous. Some longtime Sierrans worry that a takeover by the insurgents would brand the organization as bigoted and xenophobic. "I don't think that Lamm, Pimentel and Morris are racists," Pope said. "But they are clearly being supported by racists."

Zuckerman and Watson call those claims ludicrous. They argue that the club has a responsibility to take strong positions on the issues affecting the health of the planet. "Everything else the Sierra Club is doing is doomed to fail if the United States continues on its rapid population growth," said Zuckerman, 50, who was the leading vote-getter in the Sierra Club board election two years ago. "There are people who are being born today who will see a California that has more people than the entire United States when I was born," he said.

Asked what the Sierra Club could do to curb population growth, Zuckerman said the group must "talk about the numbers -- how much immigration we should have and how many babies -- so the mix of fertility and immigration is debated and we can come to a level where the population will stabilize."

Watson, who was a co-founder of Greenpeace but who broke ranks with that organization because he advocated more aggressive tactics, said he did not expect the Sierra Club to adopt the confrontational methods of Sea Shepherd. But the club, he said, should promote eating habits that protect Earth's other inhabitants. "Human beings are literally stealing resources from all the other species on this planet," said Watson, a Canadian immigrant.

In an e-mail response to the letter by the 11 former presidents, Watson wrote, "Is the advocating of low-impact vegetarian diets a cause for concern? I guess it is if you have a vested interest in grazing or the beef or poultry industry. I fail to see how vegetarianism in the age of Mad Cow Disease, E. coli, PCBs in fish, etc., can be considered anything but practical and realistic."

Sierra Club President Larry Fahn and the other prior presidents have pointed out that the club's members already voted to remain neutral on immigration in 1998 after a lengthy public debate, and said that revisiting the divisive dispute would detract from what board members have agreed is the most immediate action needed to protect the environment: unseating President Bush.

The presence of the anti-immigration candidates has led civil rights leader Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks what it considers hate groups, to join the Sierra Club and run for its board. Dees said he decided to throw his hat into the ring to generate publicity after his staff found that anti- immigration groups were urging members to join the Sierra Club and help swing the vote. "I'm not running to win a seat on the board," Dees said. "I'm running to sound the alarm of an attempt to take over this organization by the radical element of anti-immigration people. They are interested in keeping this country white."

Earlier this month, VDare.com, an anti-immigration website founded by former Forbes senior editor Peter Brimelow, author of the book "Alien Nation," ran an article discussing the Sierra Club elections. The article referred to Dees as a "left-wing smear artist" and urged immigration-control activists to join the Sierra Club and vote for like-minded candidates in its upcoming elections. The article in turn was picked up by an anti-Semitic website and topped with a homophobic, anti-Semitic headline. The author of the article, Brenda Walker, said she was dismayed at that, but Sierra Club officials cited the recycled article as evidence of extremist support for the anti-immigration candidates.

Roderick Nash, a retired UC Santa Barbara historian who has tracked the environmental movement, noted that since its early days, the Sierra Club has struggled with tensions over humanity's imprint on the environment. Gentlemen hikers and climbers -- who wanted to preserve America's beautiful places so the privileged could visit them -- wrote diatribes in the early 20th century about Anglo Americans being overrun by unsavory immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, he said.

Nor is it the first time the Sierra Club has been the target of a supposed takeover. In the late 1970s, when the club was embroiled in a battle with Walt Disney Co. over a proposed ski resort in Mineral King near Sequoia, the ski industry ran a slate of candidates to push for support of more ski resorts, Pope said. Those candidates lost.

WHY ARE OUR
STORIES ALWAYS ABOUT STRUGGLE?

WHY ARE OUR
STORIES ALWAYS ABOUT STRUGGLE? 04/11/2004 01:18 PM

Take a look at the categories of movies in the video store, or the categories of fiction in the book store, and you'll discover that the vast majority of stories in our culture are about struggle, about conflict between 'good' and 'evil', and ultimately about heroes overcoming adversity. Dramas, biographies, sports stories, war stories, mysteries, action & adventure stories, even horror stories and most romances and fantasy stories fit into this category. Most video games are the same. The only exceptions seem to be pure comedies, some children's stories, and stories from other cultures. Why is this? Isn't there enough struggle in our daily lives already?

Is it schadenfreude -- the secret pleasure we get from witnessing others' misfortune and knowing it is worse than our own?

I remember as a child asking why the Lassie stories "were always about bad things happening", Once we get past the very earliest stories of infancy, most of the stories we are told involve struggle -- Grimm's fairy tales, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Grinch etc.

Or is it about adrenaline? Do we need stories to excite us, to vicariously involve us in danger? Or do we need stories to provide us with escape, a way to get away from our own unhappiness, boredom, misfortune?

The other day I picked up an award-winning children's book called The Salamander Room written by Anne Mazer and beautifully illustrated by Steve Johnson. It's the simple, wonderful story of a boy who brings a salamander home, and wants to keep it in his room, and then in response to questions from his mother, imagines converting his room into a wilderness paradise where he and the salamander can both be at home. There is no struggle, no conflict, no hit-you-over-the-head moral.

Why do adults find such stories so unsatisfying? I have been told that in many tribal cultures the stories rarely involve struggle, and are instead about discovery, exploration, learning from others, but when Westerners read them, they assume they are "just children's stories". And when I outlined my idea for my novel on one of the environmental discussion boards several people said I should place it in an apocalyptic future, not an idyllic one, if I wanted anyone to buy it. Why can we not be engaged by stories that don't involve conflict and suffering?

What's wrong with us, anyway?

THINK
GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S
ONE
WORLD

THINK
GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S
ONE
WORLD 04/23/2004 09:24 AM

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs, using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and a great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community self-sufficiency.

At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, has come to my rescue. Singer sees no inconsistency between strong local autonomy, community, and self-sufficient economies on the one hand, and global responsibility on the other. The book is based on the Dwight Terry lectures at Yale in 2000, but has been updated to incorporate reflection on the events of 9/11 and the appalling Bush social, environmental and economic record.

I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments).

The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor.

The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations.

The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms.

Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed:

It is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global tyranny, unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is a challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration.

I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task.

GOOD,
NON-COMMERCIAL HEALTH INFORMATION

GOOD,
NON-COMMERCIAL HEALTH INFORMATION 09/11/2004 10:51 AM

The Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University has a site with useful information about 'micronutrients': vitamins, minerals, other nutrients (like Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Co-enzyme Q10), phytochemicals (trace chemicals in various plants), and the foods that contain all these nutrients. For each nutrient, you can learn its impact on the body, diseases it can help prevent or treat, where you can get it, and interactions with other nutrients, foods and drugs. The entire database can also be sorted by disease instead of by nutrient. Pauling was known, of course, for his controversial claim that large doses of vitamins can prevent the common cold and other diseases.

The site is very thorough, quite technical (but still comprehensible), and makes fascinating reading.

Thanks to tudogs.com for the link.

Speaking of health information, Health Central (the Dr. Dean Edell site) hosts the full (from what I can ascertain) contents of one of my favourite books, The People's Pharmacy. Learn how to make safe, effective treatments from natural, common ingredients that work better than most over-the-counter remedies. Find out which alternative remedies work, which are placebos and which are downright dangerous.

THE
SCRAPBOOKING PHENOMENON: BLOGGING +
PERMANENCE?

THE
SCRAPBOOKING PHENOMENON: BLOGGING +
PERMANENCE? 06/20/2004 12:36 PM

My daughter spends much of her workday at the computer, but has no interest in blogging. Her hobby is scrapbooking, a hobby that now supports a $2.5 billion industry. A scrapbook is essentially a photo album on steroids, replete with souvenirs, commentary, and now, special thematic papers to make your collage a work of art. Special scissors are involved, as are many art media (paint, chalk, etc.). Stores catering to the hobby are springing up everywhere. People belong to scrapbooking circles (where you share your technical skills in scrapbooking, more than the actual scrapbooking content, with others), and are signing up for classes in scrapbooking and attending scrapbookng conferences. There is a Scrapbooking for Dummies book.

Last week, during a delightful dinner with fellow Canadian bloggers Seb Paquet and Gary Lawrence Murphy, we talked a little about this, and my dinner companions defined the hobby as Blogging + Permanence. Where a blog consists of nothing but bits and is totally etherial, a scrapbook is tangible. It has heft. It has presence.

It is also a social hobby, far less solitary than blogging. Mothers and daughters work on their scrapbooks together. And the subject matter is much more personal than most bloggers' writings and photos (livejournal bloggers excepted). This is perhaps because the privacy of scrapbooks allows this intimacy -- no fear of stalkers stumbling on your scrapbook the way they can on your blog. And scrapbookers are overwhelmingly female. They are also, photobloggers aside, of a more artistic bent than the vast majority of bloggers. The whole point of blogs was to make website composition simpler, so the writer could concentrate on the words. Scrapbooks are all about composition, and that composition is getting more sophisticated all the time. Some scrapbookers are even taking art classes so they can supplement their photos with portraits and other works of art. The hobby is even encroaching on genealogy, with much richer stories about, and embellished with artefacts of, one's ancestors than one finds on the usual 'bare' family tree.

I keep thinking there should be more overlap between the two hobbies, but while there are lots of websites on how to scrapbook, there are very few blogs devoted to scrapbooking (and those that are seem to have mostly been abandoned, presumably so their writers can pursue their favoured hobby instead). There is certainly a ready opportunity to bring the hobbies together: Scanning the pages of a scrapbook into a blog would not be difficult, and would create a backup copy of the scrapbook that could be given to others or shared with those far away. And if the blogging tools weren't so clumsy, they could allow us to print out our blogs and preserve them, with some of the related real-life scraps, the comments threads etc., in a hard copy archive that those (like my father) who say they find reading online too hard on the eyes could browse.

Why doesn't this happen? Probably because the content is different, and the intended audience is different. The audience for your scrapbook (besides yourself) is the person sitting beside you, commenting on each page, sharing your art in a very tactile way. The audience for your blog (besides yourself) is the vast, mostly unknown horde of readers who find your ideas interesting, your compositions provocative or inspiring, your information useful, but who, for the most part, won't miss what you've written next week when it disappears into the impenetrable blog archives. Blog posts are ephemeral, quick flashes, fireworks, left brain stuff. Scrapbook pages are memories, permanent vehicles to recall, richly, again and again, treasured memories. Drawing on the right side of the brain.

DEALING WITH
GRIEF: UNPROFESSIONAL ADVICE

DEALING WITH
GRIEF: UNPROFESSIONAL ADVICE 06/03/2004 05:25 AM

I've written twice before about suicide, and a new 'advice column' in Salon.com has provoked me to write about it again. The gist of my earlier articles:

Depression is a 'natural' consequence of stress, and, as the illustration above shows, it is somewhat self-reinforcing: our DNA programs us, in situations of intense or chronic stress, to flight or flee, and if neither of those works, to shut down, withdraw, give up -- and suicide is one manifestation of shutting down and giving up;
If you haven't lived with the Noonday Demon, you can't possibly know what it's like, and you can't possibly know how it can lead someone to take their own life; and
Moral judgement of those who commit suicide is repugnant -- no one has the right to tell another human being that their personal decision to terminate their own life is 'cowardly', 'irresponsible', 'lazy', "petulant', 'immature', 'self-pitying' 'self-indulgent', 'murderous', or 'cynical and cruel'. To call someone who commits suicide a 'self-murderer' is indistinguishable from and as morally reprehensible and outrageous as calling a woman who terminates an unwanted pregnancy a 'baby murderer'.

So you will probably not be surprised to learn that I was horrified to hear Salon 'advice columnist' Cary Tennis encourage a survivor of a friend's suicide to hate and blame the one who took his own anguished life. Hate-mongering offends me at the best of times, and to see it espoused against those suffering a dreadful and incapacitating illness is disturbing. Here are two especially offensive excerpts:

Sentimentalizing suicide only encourages others who, weak-minded, pained, lacking the ability to see how foolish and wrong it is, might succeed all too well in their feeble attempts.

When they go by suicide, they leave us in an insult of dust.

What fucking gall, Mr. Tennis -- and such cruel and inflammatory language. Those who commit suicide are not weak-minded, and if this 'advice columnist' had the faintest inkling what it is like to live with suicidal depression he would know better. And who the hell does he think he is to judge the actions of someone he has never met as 'foolish and wrong'?

Mr. Tennis should also know that suicide is almost never an 'insult' to anyone. It is an act of desperation, usually after years of unimaginable suffering, to escape a living hell that the victim -- yes, victim -- can no longer bear. It usually has nothing to do with anyone else, so the last thing it is is an insult to others.

To counsel people, especially people in pain after an unexpected and shocking loss, to hate and blame the deceased is an affront to human dignity, an abuse of trust, and an offense to the memory of someone who was a victim, not a 'murderer'.

There is a perverse character flaw in some people to always assuage grief by transferring it to anger and blame. Grief is internal, and it can eat you alive. Anger and blame are externally focused. They are much easier emotions to handle. And in some cases -- like rechanneling the grief over 9/11 into anger at Osama bin Ladin -- such transferance is quite rational. But although the exploitative 'vengeance' religions would have you believe otherwise, when people suffer and die there is often no one to blame, no one to get angry at. And reaching closure, like dealing with grief, is an internal process. It is about personally coming to grips with loss, with the realization that the toxic 'what might have been' is irrelevant, a fiction, closed. It is a slow, painful healing process. And it is a process best undertaken honestly. Using some cheap trick like transferring the pain to anger and blame of a phony straw man merely perverts and delays the process, and stirs up inappropriate emotions that can only confuse and inflame, not heal.

Some advice, we're better off without.

THE BOSTON
TEA-PARTY AS 'ECO-TERRORISM'

THE BOSTON
TEA-PARTY AS 'ECO-TERRORISM' 03/06/2004 02:08 AM

A member of the Derrick Jensen mailing list pointed out a brilliantly-written letter to the editor of a small Virginia community newspaper, describing new laws to increase penalties for 'eco-terrorism', a vaguely defined term which appears to include acts of sabotage to corporate 'property', even if they do no harm to any individual.

THE TRUTH ABOUT STORIES

THE TRUTH ABOUT STORIES

This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)

THE TRUTH ABOUT STORIES

THE TRUTH ABOUT NATURE - PART TWO

THE TRUTH ABOUT NATURE - PART THREE

THE TRUTH ABOUT NATURE, PART ONE

VEIL OF TRUTH

FOUR STORIES THE MEDIA MOSTLY MISSED

WHY ARE OUR STORIES ALWAYS ABOUT STRUGGLE?

THINK GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S ONE WORLD

GOOD, NON-COMMERCIAL HEALTH INFORMATION

THE SCRAPBOOKING PHENOMENON: BLOGGING + PERMANENCE?

DEALING WITH GRIEF: UNPROFESSIONAL ADVICE

THE BOSTON TEA-PARTY AS 'ECO-TERRORISM'

THE TRUTH
ABOUT STORIES

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE - PART TWO

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE - PART THREE

THE TRUTH
ABOUT NATURE, PART ONE

VEIL OF
TRUTH

FOUR STORIES
THE MEDIA MOSTLY MISSED

WHY ARE OUR
STORIES ALWAYS ABOUT STRUGGLE?

THINK
GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S
ONE
WORLD

GOOD,
NON-COMMERCIAL HEALTH INFORMATION

THE
SCRAPBOOKING PHENOMENON: BLOGGING +
PERMANENCE?

DEALING WITH
GRIEF: UNPROFESSIONAL ADVICE

THE BOSTON
TEA-PARTY AS 'ECO-TERRORISM'