Appreciating Natural Gifts

Agriculture

Appreciating Agriculture

Food

Appreciating Food

Appreciating Energy

Appreciating Time

Government

Appreciating Government

Education

Appreciating Education

Religion

Appreciating Religion

Business

Appreciating Business

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek, New York:  1974   ISBN 0061219800, Page 9

If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.  After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor.  The whole show has been on fire from the word go.  I come down to the water to cool my eyes.

Ackerman, Diane, A Natural History Of The Senses, New York:  1990 ISBN0394573358  Page 17

The senses don’t just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern.  They take contingency samples.  They allow an instance to stand for a mob.  They negotiate and settle for a reasonable version and make small, delicate transactions.  Life showers over everything, radiant, gushing.   The senses feed shards of information to the brain like microscopic pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

1996 Wilson, Edward Osborne, In Search Of Nature, Washington,  ISBN 1559632151, Page 57

If one of these ants were a six-foot-tall person, it would be running along those trails of pyrazine at a pace of about 3:45 minutes per mile.  That’s about the current human world record.  At the end of the trail, after running roughly the distance of a marathon, it would pick up a load of 300 pounds or ore and carry it home at the slightly slower pace of 4 minutes per mile.  Upon reaching the nest, it would climb down through the galleries and chambers of he nest for a distance of up to one mile before depositing its leaf load.

Foster, Catherine Osgood,  Terrific Tomatoes 1975:  ISBN 0878570942, Page 2

Among all the available microorganisms that inhabit soil, those that derive nitrogen from the air are especially useful.  There are so many of these nitrogen-fixing and other kinds of bacteria that you can expect a billion in each gram of soil, some at rest in the spore stage and others at work getting energy from the carbohydrates, fats, or proteins of the organic matter they live on and decompose.  One kind converts organic nitrogen to ammonia; another converts ammonia to nitrites; and another changes nitrites to nitrates, the form in which plants can use nitrogen.

There are also actinomycetes, occurring 15 to 20 million per gram, little organisms halfway between bacteria and fungi.  They are what give newly-turned soul in the spring that fresh earthy smell.  They are at work in the soul and in compost piles helping to decay the raw materials into soft, dark humus. 

Along with these are fungi, in quantities of about a million per gram, with a larger structure than the other organisms, often with a whole maze of tiny threads that stretch up unto cellulose, for instance, and decompose it.  In addition, the population of soil creatures includes yeasts, one-celled protozoans, and the microscopic plants called algae which, if they have some light, can work on the carbon dioxide of the air and change it to organic matter as higher plants do.

McAfee advertisement for computer virus detection.  "We love problems.  We love pulling their little wings off and squishing them between our fingers."  Advertisement in ­PC WORLD ­October 1999.

BUGS.  WORMS.  VIRUSES.  SO MANY WICKED PESTS OUT THERE ARE DETERMINED TO INFEST YOUR COMPUTER AND DESTROY YOUR WORK.   FORTUNATELY FOR YOU, WE ENJOY TORTURING THOSE LITTLE DEVILS TO DEATH.  QUICKLY. WITH STONE-COLD PRECISION.

THE NATURAL STEP NEWSLETTER - SPRING 2000 -- 10 Mar 2000

System Condition Four --  Technical

From a systems perspective, natural systems are inherently efficient. Unfortunately, human systems today are not.  This is where people have a lot to learn from the planet.  The challenge is for people to understand the local conditions and boundaries of a given environment and then to find ways to design and use the resources within that environment.  Dr. George Basile, Senior Scientist at The Natural Step US, explains, "There is opportunity in system condition four for people to work with and within the system - to be efficient in the same way a tree is efficient.  A tree throws off branches and leaves, blows off water and oxygen, and finally falls flat and sprawls on the ground.  Yes, it makes a huge mess, but a tree is still efficient within the system because the 'waste' it produces is used as a resource for something, or someone, else.  We can shift from linear models of infinite resource use and infinite growth to cyclical models of infinite transformation and change.  This is how nature works."

For many companies, an important step is redefining their products as services.  For example, someone selling lamps might come to realize that what they are actually selling is light.  In most cases, this new perspective makes the prospect of redesigning products and operations more appealing.  It typically makes throwing out the "stuff" that supplies your service seem like a bad idea.  In all cases, it opens, enables, and encourages innovation and creativity.  In doing this, companies can make a stronger connection between their businesses and the rest of humanity and the living systems we are imbedded in.  Companies come to see their business as in some way helping to meet human needs -- which often brings the concepts of fairness and equity into the equation.

Howard T. Odum, Power In Ecological Systems, Environment, Power, And Society, New York:  1971  ISBN 0471652709 Page 90

We find the efficiency of gross plant production to be about 2 percent....

Casey Walker, “Interview with Charlene Spretnak,” Wild Duck Review, Vol. IV, No. 1, Winter 1998.

We continue to take the “immense bribe” of the Megamachine,” as Lewis Mumford put it thirty years ago:  the absorption of every human activity into the technological realm by seductive assurances of ever-increasing ease, power, and abundance.  We seem oblivious to the dependence being created.  Now that we have pocket calculators, few people master or remember basic arithmetic.  Now that we have “spell-check,” young people see no need to master spelling.  Industrial arts classes, where boys and (at long last) girls learned the pride of accomplishment that comes from working with one’s hands and natural materials, have been replaced in most schools with computer labs.  Many young people can push a button on a microwave oven but cannot cook at all.  Social skills and various subtle benefits of human interaction are also in decline, as growing numbers of us spend more time each day talking to machines than people— and as children who log a great deal of computer time exhibit shyness and withdrawn behavior.

My point about technology, in the book, is that it’s neither evil nor value-free.  Rather, the design of every new technological device reflects our cultural history.  An awareness of that history is essential if we are to recognize dangerous tendencies and chart an eco-socially wholesome future.  Failing that, we’re vulnerable to all the Empower-the- Autonomous-Individual hype that basically lets everything else go to hell—and, in the bargain, diminishes to pathetic proportions the individual’s full experience of being.

Marx, Leo.  The Domination of Nature and the Redefinition of Progress. Page 203

A culture’s belief in Progress, put differently, derives from (and refers to) that distinctively modern kind of social change made possible by acquiring from the realm of nature the unprecedented power to establish a steadily increasing domination of nature.

Macy, Joanna R., and Molly Young Brown.  Coming Back to Life Canada: 1998.  ISBN 086571391X, Page 39

We have studied the Earth and the cosmos, attempting to discover the essential building blocks of life that we might manipulate them into more efficient mechanisms to provide for our wants and needs.  We have acted as if we could know and control the world from the outside, as if we were separate from it.  We came to think of ourselves as made of better stuff than the animals and plants and rocks and water around us.  And our technologies of the last centuries amplified disastrously the ecological effects of that assumption.

Marshall D. Sahlins,  Evolution And Culture,  Michigan, 1960:  ISBN 0472087762 Page 20

One common notion of progress can be dismissed out of hand.  Most of us have a tendency to equate progress with efficiency, which is not altogether surprising because this idea is peculiarly appropriate to a competitive, free-enterprise economy.  But an organism’s thermodynamic efficiency is not a measure of its general evolutionary status.  By efficiency we usually mean some ratio of output to input; thus in rating a machine’s efficiency we divide the output of work by the input of energy.  Analogously, a measure of the thermodynamic efficiency of a living thing would be the amount of energy captured and used relative to the organism’s own expenditure in the process of taking it.  But suppose we know the efficiency of an organism as an energy-capturing machine; the use to which the efficiency is put remains unknown.  Is it put into build-up of higher structures or into more numerous offspring, each of which concentrates a relatively low amount of energy.  The implication is inescapable:  an organism can be more efficient than another and yet remain less highly developed.

Elizabeth Sawin, “Dead Zone Economics,” The Sustainability Institute, October 1, 2002.

www.sustainer.org/pubs/columns/10.01.02Swain.html

Page 1

The headline in the August 16 issue of Science magazine is ominous—“Dead Zone Grows.”  To the right of the headline is a map of the Gulf of Mexico.  And drawn on the map, hugging the shoreline, is an irregular green stripe.  This is the Dead Zone, and area of the Gulf where oxygen levels are so low that most marine organisms—including crab and shrimp—cannot survive.  A primary cause of the problem is fertilizer runoff from farms in the Mississippi River watershed.  The runoff stimulates algae blooms.  When the algae die, they sink to the bottom and decompose, using up oxygen in the process.  This year the Dead Zone is bigger than ever before -- 22,000 square kilometers—an area larger than New Jersey….

Farmers—like all entrepreneurs in free-market systems— compete to stay in business.  And the terms of that competition are well defined.  Who can produce the most grain for the least cost of labor, land, machinery, and inputs?  The farmers who are the best at maximizing this equation—the most “efficient” farmers—are the most likely to stay in business.  As the “least efficient” farmers and farming practices disappear, farming as a whole becomes more and more efficient.  This has brought enormous innovation and gains in productivity.  Yields of corn have risen from about 30 bushels per acre in 1940 to around 120 bushels per acre today….

The kind of efficiency that determines whether a farmer earns a profit and manages to hold on to his land is a very particular efficiency.  It is the efficiency of producing just one thing—a crop—with the frugal use of a few things—labor, land, equipment, and inputs, like seed and fertilizer.  There is nothing in this equation about producing health in the Gulf of Mexico or about being frugal with water quality.  In the equation that determines who survives in farming, the Gulf of Mexico is invisible.  And that is why the Gulf of Mexico has a Dead Zone and why that Dead Zone is growing.

Page 2

It doesn’t have to be this way.  There is nothing in our current definition of efficiency that is a natural law.  We could re-orient our thinking to expand what we reward.  We could begin to think of clean water or regenerating soil as products of farming in addition to wheat and barley.  Many European countries have done just that.  Farmers and farmland are seen as producing beauty, water purification and biodiversity as well as crops, and government programs offer payments for these other kinds of productivity.

Sam Keen

There were fish before there were fishermen, indigo buntings before ornithologists, and a whole earth before a Whole Earth Catalog.

Havel, Vaclav.  The Art of the Impossible.  New York: 1994.  ISBN 0676970494

I am increasingly inclined to believe that even the term “environment,” which is inscribed on the banners of many commendable civic movements, is in its own way misguided, because it is unwittingly the product of the very anthropocentrism that has caused extensive devastation of our earth.  The word “environment” tacitly implies that whatever is not human merely envelops us and is therefore inferior to us, something we need care for only if it is in our interest to do so.  I do not believe this to be the case.  The world is not divided into two types of being, one superior and the other merely surrounding it.  Being, nature, the universe—they are all one infinitely complex and mysterious metaorganism of which we are but a part, though a unique one.

I believe that the devastation of the environment brought about by the communist regimes is a warning to all of contemporary civilization.  I believe that you should read the message coming to you from our part of the world as an appeal to protect the world against all those who despise the mystery of Being, whether they be cynical businessmen with only the interests of their corporations at heart, or left-wing saviors high on cheap ideological utopias. 

Both lack what I would call a metaphysical anchor, that is, a humble respect for the whole of creation, and a consciousness of our obligation to it.  If parents believe in God, their children will not have to go to school wearing gas masks, and their eyes will be free of pus.

Samuel P. Hays,  Conservation And The Gospel Of Efficiency, Massachusetts: 1959 Page 127

Lord Kelvin, he declared, was once asked how water power development at Niagara Falls would affect its natural  beauty; His reply was that of a true engineer: ‘What has that got to do with it? I consider it almost an international crime that so much energy has been allowed to go to waste.’”

Sut Jhally v. James Twitchell,  From Stay Free! issue #16. http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/16/twitchell_text.html

I see a great deal of advertising and commercialism as being the articulated will of consumers rather than the air pumped out by commercial interests. Let's take an example where you seem to hold all the cards. Take De Beers' diamonds campaign. What is more ridiculous than the browbeating of men into buying utterly worthless hunks of stone to make Harry Oppenheimer and his descendants wealthy?

Here's this company saying that if you want to be successful in courting women, it requires two months of your salary. Isn't this an example, from your point of view, of power from the outside compressing human freedom and desire? Yet as hideous as it is--and I think it the most hideous of advertising campaigns--there is something in it that speaks deeply to human beings in moments of high anxiety--namely, how to stabilize a frantic period of time. You stabilize it by buying something that all logic tells you is ridiculous and stupid, at a time in your life when you are the least able to afford it, when it is the most wasteful expenditure, and the cruelest exploitation in terms of how these stones are mined. And they're completely worthless. I mean, at least Nike makes good shoes! You would say, "Boy, I rest my case," but I say, "Is there any other explanation?" The explanation, I think, is the need to make ceremony, to fetishize moments of great anxiety. You can actually see them colonizing these moments later in life; now they're saying the ten-year anniversary or the twenty-year anniversary demands a whole new panoply of these otherwise worthless stones.

Guardini, Romano.  Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human race. Michigan: 1994.  ISBN 0802801080 Pages 13 and 16

In the sailing ship we had a natural existence, for all the presence of mind and spirit in the situation.  We had our being in a natural culture.  In the modern steamer, however, we are in an artificial situation; measured by the vital elastic human limits, nature has been decisively eliminated.  Once there was an order, a living space, which made possible a human existence in a specific sense.  On the steamer that is no longer  present.  We can no longer be seafarers in the first and special sense in which seafaring is a basic form of human existence filled with its own content.  The crew members of a liner are not essentially different from employees on the assembly line of a factory....

In all manual work we find the primal phenomenon of culture that is human but close to nature.  Now compare the smithy with our factories and their electric machines.  And compare carpentry and bricklaying with concrete or prefabricated housing.  Compare the work of the cabinetmaker or wheelwright with the division of labor at a Ford factory, which breaks down the products into small parts that are produced in vast numbers daily.

In the former we have culture, a work of mind and spirit, yet still close to nature.  In it we are creative and stand breast to breast with the things and forces of nature.  Here we are human in the deepest sense of the term.  But this human culture has almost disappeared.  We no longer have wheeled vehicles pulled by animals, with all the vitality that is in them and around them, but automobiles.

Smith, Adam The Wealth of Nations, Book one, Chapter 1

www.bibliomania.com/NonFiction/Smith/Wealth/Bk1Chap01.html

To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture; but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving, the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations. But though they were very poor, and therefore but indifferently accommodated with the necessary machinery, they could, when they exerted themselves, make among them about twelve pounds of pins in a day. There are in a pound upwards of four thousand pins of a middling size. Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations.

Russell, Bertrand.“In Praise of Idleness”, 1932

 Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying:    'Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a       highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to      the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached….

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, New York: Avon Books, 1977 Page 7

The terms exploitation and nurture, on the other hand, describe a division not only between persons but also within persons....  Let me outline as briefly as I can what seem to me the characteristics of these opposite kinds of mind.  I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and a model nurturer, I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer.  The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not.  The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care.

Lewis Mumford, Technics and civilization New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934, Page 359

Le Play once asked his auditors what was the most important thing that came out of the mine; after one had guessed coal and another iron and another gold, he answered: No, the most important thing that comes out of the mine is the miner.

Thompson, William Irwin, The American Replacement Of Nature, New York, 199: ISBN 0385420250,Pages 68, 133-4

We will have this polity of mediocracy in which imagineers manipulate images for the electropeasantry as long as we have television as our dominant form of communication.  It will do no good to try to create some new Amish Lancaster County in which there is no TV, for that quaint space will only become yet another movie set of heritage and tradition in the midst of the vast electronic polity.  It will only be when television is superseded by some new technology of communication, just as television superseded print, that we will have a new noetic polity created by the new means of communication.  When that happens, humanity will probably look back upon the age of television as a dark age....

If light can be both wave and particle, so can humanity, for it seems to me that the mankind of hominid males also contains two profoundly true but opposed human beings, and that each comes equipped with its own light and shadow.  One is immanental, and sees divinity within the pattern of connectiveness of Earth, animals, and women.  The other is transcendental and sees Earth, animals, and women as an imprisonment of spirit and cosmic mind.  One wants in, the other wants out.  One is a wave which, because of its own infolded order, feels itself to be in resonance with everything.  The other is a particle, which because of its limited self-definition feels alienated and alone and wishes to have power over the others that impinge on its self-inflicted boundaries.  For the sake of a working distinction, let’s call these two types of human males the poet and the engineer.

The poet loves ambiguity, complexity, and the lingual, erotic play with words; the engineer loves logic, manual systems of control, and computational machine codes of one meaning only.  The poet loves to hang out with women, to listen to them, sleep with them, smell them, taste them, and all without benefit of chemical additives of deodorants, perfumes, mouthwashes, and feminine hygiene douches.  The engineer locks onto object fixation and stimulating fetishes; a perfume or a sexy costume can trigger his response, but his excitement is as evanescent as it is artificial, for no sooner is he hydraulically relieved of the pressure to ejaculate than he begins to feel the need of getting back to work with his fellows, be they in the lab, the office, the pub, the gang, or the country club.

The poet likes things that are slow, contemplative, rich, dark, complex, soft, wet, and moving.  The engineer likes things that are hard, fixed, and gleamingly stainless-steel bright.  Where do these two different systems of erotic fascination come from?  From toilet training?  Or even earlier with hospital births in which the entire institutional power of the hospital descends on the infant to scrub him with chemicals and package him in detergent-smelling fabrics so that he can be encased in glass and steel and set in a wheeled vehicle that is moving away from that vulva, a vulva that is not seen as a Georgia O’Keeffe flower but a wet and repulsive female mess from which he may have emerged but now distance himself with as much technology as possible?  In a technologically assisted birth, we are brought forth by scalpel and forceps and, perhaps, learn to bond at once with these tools of bright and stainless steel.  In a natural birth, we are massaged into life by a vagina and are awakened to consciousness by lips moving across our face and sliding down the length of our entire body.

AtKisson, Alan.  ­Believing Cassandra.­  White River Junction, VT:  Chelsea Green Publishing 1999.ISBN 1890132160, Pages 14 and 25

In one of several articles concerning the book [Limits to Growth], Time magazine described it as written in "restrained, nonhysterical, at times almost apologetic language," and noted with sadness that "the study closes almost every escape hatch."   Technology would solve the resources problem only to exacerbate the pollution problem.  Efficiency could reduce pollution, but that wouldn't stop population growth from running rampant and using up all the land for growing food.  "There is only one way out," says the report: "economic as well as population growth must be stopped cold some time between 1975 and 1990 by holding world investment in new plant and machinery equal to the rate at which physical capital wears out."

Efficiency and clean-up technologies did make it possible to reduce emissions of various kinds -- but growth in population and affluence erased many of those gains while increasing unforeseen forms of pollution such as greenhouse gases and ozone-layer destroyers.

There are no limits to Development.  The way we live can always be made better:  more beautiful, more inventive, more creative, more efficient, more fulfilling.  Technologies can be radically and continuously improved.  Humans can learn, change, adapt, and evolve, often with astonishing rapidity.   We can repair most of the damage we have caused, restore some of what has been lost, reinvent the systems on which we depend for survival.  We have transformed ourselves and our civilizations many times in the past, at both large scales and small; we are doing so now; and we will do so over and over again.  Since there is no limit on humanity's capacity to evolve, Development can go on virtually forever.

Gorner Peter, “Simplicity, efficiency of bull calf clones moves society closer to human cloning” Chicago Tribune, 01/07/2000

They’re called Tommy, Andy, Timothy and Anthony - the first initials spell TATA, for the genetic control region of their DNA - and they are rambunctious clones of a world-famous Japanese bull. But the simplicity, efficiency and elegance behind their creation moves society a giant step closer to human cloning, and it’s happening much faster than anyone predicted. The four bull calves, ranging in age from 7 to 9 months, unveiled last week by the University of Connecticut and the Kogashima Cattle Breeding Development Institute in Japan, indicate how biologists are overcoming technical difficulties that once seemed insurmountable.

“The results of the experiment say that age is not critical. If you extend it to humans, it may mean that a couple who can’t get pregnant by any other means has an option,” said Dr. Mario Capecchi, a genetics pioneer at the University of Utah who wrote a commentary about the experiment in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences…

.

“It took the Scots 300 tries to clone Dollie the sheep. So that was 1 in 300; it wasn’t in the ballpark of being able think about human cloning. But the efficiency with these bull calves was 1 in 10, even though two of the calves died shortly after birth. It’s not perfect.  What would we think about a procedure where the kids could die afterward?

“But in just a few years, the numbers have dropped from 1 in 300, to 1 in 10. If it gets to be 1 in 2, then what? As soon as the probability reaches the same level as normal conception, then from an ethical point of view you have to find another argument”….

Shephard, Paul  “Virtually Hunting Reality in the Forests of Simulacra” in Soule, Michael E., and Gary Lease.  ­Reinventing Nature?­  Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction.­  D.C.:  1995 ISBN 1559633107,  Page 17

The postmodern constructionist view is that all texts, reports, narratives are but descriptions -- focused chatter about an unknowable external world, psychobabble, webs of words that serve as ammunition in struggles over who dominates whom.  But Derrida, Lyotard, and other deconstructionists have about them the smell of the coffeehouse, a world of ironic, patronizing remoteness in which the search for generality and truth would be an embarrassment.  Moreover, somehow justified by the deconstruction of nature are the theme parks, malls, and other virtual simulations of originals that create a world easier to control, a world where imagination is the only real landscape and where denial replace even disengagement and relativism.  The loss of contract with nature, a biophilic  deprivation, must lead to pathology.  But other animal species, because they have no words to confuse themselves, are not so deluded.

Kunstler, James Howard Home from Nowhere, New York, 1996: Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0684811960 Page 85-6

The artifact replacements for these rural things in the form of a suburban housing subdivision turn out to be rather paltry.  They end up acting more as sinister barriers to other living patterns, leaving us in a kind of neurobiological slum.  There is the numbing undertone of the lawnmowers in their ceaseless battle to discipline the monoculture of grass.  There is the sound of radios and the smell of soapy water evaporating on warm asphalt as the cars are washed in the driveways.  The odor of pesticide wafts off the rose bushes, making us shudder with intimations of cancer or mutant offspring.  One is neither in nature, nor in an authentic human community (which is also in and of nature).  This unreality turns out to be very costly.  Maintaining the artifice of millions of little cabins in the woods like these causes a tremendous amount of what we call environmental damage, meaning it disrupts or destroys existing patterns in nature, and lately it does so at a scale that begins to threaten the larger intersecting patterns of the organism that constitute our planet.

A more optimistic view of technology, for instance, might pose the great advances of our time as the prelude to an evolutionary leap that would permit us to live much more equitably among other living patterns.  Almost all the damage we’ve caused has occurred in the past 200 years, nanosecond in geological time.  Our great-great- grandchildren may look back at these crude industrial centuries as some ghastly stage of human development like puberty, complete with all the physical disfigurement and idiocy that we associate with puberty.

Cooper, Gail.  ­Air-Conditioning America.­  Maryland:  1998.  ISBN 0801857163, Page 2

For years both the pleasant and the irritating aspects of opening windows were inevitably linked, for the weather has always been something admittedly beyond human control.  That is why we still laugh at Mark Twain's joke that "everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it." Yet with the appearance of air conditioning, the technical community began to take seriously the idea of creating a man-made indoor climate -- the mechanical reproduction indoors of the best aspects of the weather outside.  At last, engineers argued, human beings would be in control.   We could -- and some argued that we should -- close our windows forever.

McKibben, Bill.  “Out There In The Middle Of The Buzz.”  FORBES ASAP December 2, 1996 Page 107

Electronic communication, for the first time, makes culture ubiquitous.  Almost nobody read books five hours a day, or went to the theater every night.  We live in the first moment when humans receive more of their information secondhand than first; instead of relying primarily on contact with nature and with each other, we rely primarily on the pre-chewed, on someone else’s experience.  Our life is, quite literally, mediated.

Kunstler, James Howard, The Geography Of Nowhere, New York, 1993, ISBN 0671707744, Page 131

The road is now like television, violent and tawdry.  The landscape it runs through is littered with cartoon buildings and commercial messages.  We whiz by them at fifty-five miles and hour and forget them, because one convenience store looks like the next.  They do not celebrate anything beyond their mechanistic ability to sell merchandise.  We don’t want to remember them.  We did not savor the approach and we were not rewarded upon reaching the destination, and it will be the same next time, and every time.  There is little sense of having arrived anywhere, because everyplace looks like noplace in particular.

Wilson, Edward Osborne, In Search Of Nature, Washington, 1996:  ISBN 1559632151, Page 119

It is notable that the phobias are most easily evoked by many of the greatest dangers of mankind’s ancient environment, including tight spaces, heights, thunderstorms, running water, snakes, and spiders, but are rarely evoked by the greatest dangers of modern technological society, including guns, knives, automobiles, explosives, and electric sockets.

White, Richard.  The Nature of Progress:  Progress and the Environment.

Mainstream environmentalism, however, has never really demanded deprivation, at least from its supporters.  It, in the best progressive tradition, often only seeks to make consumption more efficient.  Environmentalism has been, and remains, a largely middle-class and metropolitan movement.  And, as Samuel Hays has argued, it has represented not a rejection of consumption, but a new aspect of it.  In saving the earth, middle-class environmentalists also opened it up for their own leisure activities.  Wild lands no longer consumed for their ore, timber, or energy are now consumed as sources of experience:  hiking, skiing, rafting, photography.  It would be hard to read a magazine such as Outside or an REI or Eddie Bauer catalog as a rejection of consumerism and consumption.  And as organized groups, environmentalists assert a privileged claim to valued resources.

The environment becomes analogous to an orchestra made up of numerous different instruments—and there is a score for the orchestra to play, but there is no concert hall.  Instead, they have to play out in a very busy street.  Between the conductor being arrested for obstructing traffic, the string section getting flattened by a truck, the percussionists running for their lives, and a touring mariachi band deciding to sit in, whatever emerges from the surrounding din will probably have only a chance resemblance to what the score intended.

Sagoff, Mark.  The Economy of the Earth.  New York: ISBN 0521341132 Pages 28-9

Our environmental goals—cleaner air and water, the preservation of wilderness and wildlife, and the like—are not to be construed, then, simply as personal wants or preferences; they re not interests to be “priced” by markets or by cost-benefit analysis, but are views or beliefs that may find their way, as public values, into legislation.  These goals stem from our character as a people, which is not something we choose, as we might choose a necktie or a cigarette, but something we recognize, something we are.

These goals presuppose the reality of public or shared values we can recognize together, values that are discussed and criticized on their merits and are not to be confused with preferences that are appropriately priced in markets.  Our democratic political processes allow us to argue our beliefs on their merits— as distinct from pricing our interests at the margin.

Sagoff, Mark.  Carrying Capacity and Ecological Economics.  Pages 28-9

Moreover, the so-called carrying capacity of the earth for human beings is not a scientific concept and cannot be measured by biologists.  It is an elastic notion depending on social, economic, industrial, and agricultural practices.

Morality teaches us that we are rich in proportion to the number of things we can afford to let alone, that we are happier in proportion to the desires we can control rather than those we can satisfy, and that a simpler life is more worth living.  Economic growth may not be morally desirable even if it I ecologically sustainable.

Advances in technology may one by one expunge the instrumental reasons for protecting nature, leaving us only with our cultural commitments and moral intuitions.  To argue for environmental protection on utilitarian grounds— because of carrying capacity or sources raw materials and sinks for wastes— is therefore to erect only a fragile and temporary defense for the spontaneous wonder and glory of the natural world.

Roodman, David Malin.  ­Harnessing the Market for the Environment.­  New York:  1998.  ISBN 0393318524,

Pages 71 and 155

Not only does a modern combine harvester, for instance, let one pair of hands do the work of many, it also works most economically on large fields.  Technologies like these contributed much to the rapid fall in the number of U.S. farms since 1930.  Similarly, factory trawlers as long as football fields are leading to the demise of whole fishing towns.

The automation threat to jobs and communities does not end there.  Industries that do not automate as fast as the rest of the economy will shed jobs as surely as those that do.  This is because the more efficiently other industries use workers -- that is, the more income they generate per hour of labor employed -- the higher pay those workers can demand.  Resource-intensive industries with low worker productivity will eventually find themselves outbid by other industries.  Unless they get more subsidies, they will have to scale back operations.  This process of drawing labor to its most valuable use -- essentially one of creative destruction -- is precisely what has diversified and enriched industrial economies over the last two centuries.   For better or worse, it is not easily resisted….

Economists usually argue that governments should allow environmental harm just up to the point where the costs to society begin to outweigh the economic benefits.  But environmental problems, like most important issues, involve more than costs and benefits:  they also involve values and vision, rights and wrongs.  Yet if the crime of pollution pays, cost-benefit analysis endorses it.

Callicot, Baird, J.  Earth’s Insights:  A Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback.  California:  1994. ISBN 0520085590  Page xvii

As the environmental movement has arisen these past two decades, the environmental crisis itself has deepened.  Paradoxically, a majority of Americans describe themselves as strongly committed to the environment, yet our soils, water, air, and countless species of plants and animals degrade and disappear at catastrophic rates.  Globally, population has doubled and natural resources have been cut in half in only fifty years.

The crisis cannot be resolved simply by making present arrangements more efficient, although that would help.  Our political and economic systems are based on obsolete notions that the environment is an infinite storehouse of raw materials for industry, as well as a bottomless container for waste.  These assumptions are about as accurate as the long-held belief that the world is flat, yet they endure as the source of everyday behavior.  Examples of this blind denial come before me everyday as a state senator in Sacramento. 

Environmental law has made a difference for advocates, but less so for living ecosystems.  California forestry law, for example, mandates “maximum timber productivity” as the official policy goal.  If you are an ancient redwood tree on our North coast, “maximum productivity” means a death sentence.  A 700-year-old redwood has no intrinsic value apart from the price it will command as the deck of a condominium.

Brooks, David.  “Cell Phones Naturalists.”  UTNE Reader March - April 1999  Page 76

My main problem, though, was that I brought to REI a set of false presuppositions.  I thought that if you were the type who wanted to go out into nature, you would want to be natural.  You’d be a woodsy sort of person who likes to get away from the pollution and artificiality of civilization and find spiritual cleansing in the wilderness.  In short, you’d value nature, not high-tech wizardry.  You’d aim for anti-commercial simplicity, not flashy consumer connoisseurship....

Back at REI, however, the culture war between the party of the machine and the party of nature is obsolete.  The people here are simultaneously pro-technology and pro-nature.  Seattle is one of the most technologically advanced cities in America and also one of the most technologically advanced cities in America and also one of the most environmentally aware.  No matter how conservative or libertarian the people in suburban Seattle may be on economic matters, they are environmentalists through and through.  And the equipment at REI seems to have reconciled nature and economic development.  Today, after all, the machine in the garden is a cell phone in the forest.  In the postindustrial era, technology and nature no longer seem such rivals.  We are now seeing the emergence of the Cell Phone Naturalists (a phrase I owe to National Public Radio’s Julia Redpath), who are technologists, capitalists, and environmentalists all at once.  Cell Phone Naturalists are optimistic about material progress, as were the materialists yore.  But they don’t see society as a giant mechanism run according to rational, comprehensible laws, as their techie predecessors did.  They don’t think mechanistically at all.  Instead, they think organically, like romantics.

David G and Carol P. Myers.  Wealth and Well-Being. New York: 1992.  ISBN 0380-715228 Page 39

This may be a surprise, but in the University of Michigan’s national surveys what matters more than absolute wealth is perceived wealth.  Money is two steps removed from happiness.  Actual income doesn’t much influence happiness; how satisfied we are with our income does.  If we’re content with our income, regardless of how much it is, we’re likely to say we’re happy.  Strangely, however, there is only a slight tendency for people who make lots of money to be more satisfied with what they make.  It’s true:  Satisfaction isn’t so much getting what you want as wanting what you have. This implies two ways to be rich: One is to have great wealth.  The other is to have few wants.  “Peace in a thatched hut—that is happiness,” says a Chinese proverb.

Berger, John, Pig Earth New York, 1979:  ISBN 0394512685 Page 208

When a peasant resists the introduction of a new technique or method of working, it is not because he cannot see its possible advantages—his conservatism is neither blind nor lazy—but because he believes that these advantages cannot, by the nature of things, be guaranteed, and that, should they fail, he will then be cut off alone and isolated from the routine of survival.

Leider, Richard, Repacking Your Bags, California, 1995:  ISBN 1881052672 Page 3

I’m a walking advertisement for a Patagonia or L.L. Bean catalogue.  But of course, I have to be.  As expedition leader, I’m responsible for the entire group.  So, in addition to the required group-size first aid kit, I’ve also been sure to bring along items that will make our trek not just safe, but enjoyable.  I’m no Boy Scout, but I certainly subscribe to their motto, “Be prepared.” And I have made it a point to be prepared for just about anything.

As we walk along, Koyie keeps glancing at my pack.  Time and again, I see him mentally comparing the heavy load I carry with his own, which consists of nothing more than a spear and a stick used for cattle tending.  Eventually we get to talking about my backpack, and he expresses his fascination with seeing its contents.  Pleased at how impressed he appears to be, I offer to show him my stuff.  I look forward to letting him see how carefully I’ve prepared for our journey and how ready I am for anything.

The opportunity presents itself late that afternoon as we are setting up camp near another boma.  Proudly, I commence to lay out for him everything in my pack.  I unsnap snaps, unzip zippers, and un-Velcro Velcro.  From pouches, pockets, and compartments I produce all sorts of strange and wonderful items. Eating utensils, cutting devices, digging tools.  Direction finders, star gazers, map readers.  Things to write with and on.  Various garments in various sizes for various functions.  Medical supplies, remedies, and cures. Little bottles inside little bottles inside little bottles.  Waterproof bags for everything.  Amazing stuff!

At length, I have all the gear spread out.  It looks like that photo they always have in the centerfold of the great explorer article that shows everything necessary for a successful trip to the farthest reaches of the planet.  Needless to say, I’m pretty satisfied with my collection.

I look over at Koyie to gauge his reaction.  He seems amused, but silent.  I understand.  Surveying the items arrayed about us, I don’t know quite what to say, either. Finally, after several minutes of just gazing at everything, Koyie turns to me and asks very simply, but with great intensity: “Does all this make you happy?”

Cox, Michael W., and Richard Alm.  ­The Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We’re Better Off Than We Think.  ­New York: Basic Books   1999.  ISBN 046504784X  Page 7

TABLE 1.1  The World Through Rip's Eyes

Huber, Peter W.  ­Hard Green.­  New York:  1999. ISBN 0465031129, Page xxv

The Softs maintain that efficiency is environmentally frugal.  They believe that human privation promotes environmental wealth, even if they rarely dare say so directly.  Softs are sure that efficiency alone will do much to save the environment:  efficient furnaces and cars, efficient refrigerators and lightbulbs, even efficient trash, trash so efficient it is transformed back into valuable resources by the magic of a Soft Green recycling truck.  They believe in trickle-up environmentalism, the notion that what you save in your more efficient refrigerator will become savings at the power plant, which will become savings at the coal mine.

Hard Greens don’t believe a word of it.  To our eyes, the Softs’ efficiency crusades are a useless distraction at best and positively harmful insofar as they divert attention and promote a false illusion of green progress.  In their endlessly meddlesome crusades for efficiency, the Softs are peddling the ecological equivalent of Thin Thighs in Thirty Days.  The energy saved on a more efficient refrigerator trickles all too easily into a larger one, just as the calories saved with a diet Coke generally trickle into a brownie.  Efficiency is not frugality.  Forcing efficiency upon consumers does nothing to make them more frugal, except insofar as it makes them poorer.  And it is not poverty that makes people green.  It is wealth.

Overfishing Imposes A Heavy Toll   By WILLIAM J. BROAD and ANDREW C. REVKIN

New York Times, July 29, 2003, Section D1 – Science Times, Pages 1-2

Most of the earth's surface is covered by oceans, and their vastness and biological bounty were long thought to be immune to human influence. But no more. Scientists and marine experts say decades of industrial-scale assaults are taking a heavy toll.

More than 70 percent of commercial fish stocks are now considered fully exploited, overfished or collapsed. Sea birds and mammals are endangered. And a growing number of marine species are reaching the precariously low levels where extinction is considered a real possibility.

"It's an incipient disaster," said Richard Ellis, author of "The Empty Ocean." A rush of recent studies, reports, books and conferences have described the situation as a crisis and urged governments and the industry to enact substantial changes.

Behind the assault, experts say, are steady advances in technology, national subsidies to fishing fleets and booming markets for seafood. Demand is up partly because fish is considered healthier to eat than chicken and red meat.

Directed by precise sonar and navigation gear, more than 23,000 fishing vessels of over 100 tons and several million small ones are scouring the sea with trawls that sweep up bottom fish and shrimp; setting miles of lines and hooks baited for tuna, swordfish and other big predators; and deploying other gear in a hunt for seafood in ever deeper, more distant waters.

Flash freezers allow them to preserve their catch so they can sweep waters right to the fringes of Antarctica. The trade is so global that an 80-year-old Patagonian toothfish hooked south of Australia can end up served by its more market-friendly name, Chilean sea bass, in a San Francisco bistro.

Seafood industry officials say overfishing and disregard for environmental harm peaked a decade ago. They point to the spreading adoption of gear that avoids unintended catches, acceptance of quotas and other limits, and agreements to conserve ocean-roaming fishes like tunas.

"We now have a better understanding of the limitations of the resources," said Linda Candler of the National Fisheries Institute, an industry lobbying group.  Federal fisheries officials note that although 80 American fish stocks have serious problems, restoration plans are in the works, and other stocks are rebounding. The North Atlantic swordfish is often cited as a sign of success. After limits were imposed four years ago, it has now largely recovered.

Pietro Parravano, who trolls for salmon out of Half Moon Bay, Calif., said fishery critics tended to overlook damage done by pollution and destruction of coastal wetlands. "It's not just our activity that's leading to this decline," he said. "If fishermen are doing something wrong, they're willing to adapt."